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A man convicted of burglary in Massachusetts did not have his rights violated when the state court limited his cross-examination of the victim and when the prosecutors withheld the 911 transcript, the First Circuit held on Wednesday. In both cases, the court found, the information and theories the defense wished to advance were still introduced to the jury despite the alleged violations. The unpublished opinion was authored, perhaps with a fountain pen, by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter....

Poor, poor Zynga. They’ve gone from making insanely-popular social games, such as FarmVille and Words With Friends (a Scrabble clone), to a massively-overhyped IPO, to the laughingstock of Silicon Valley. Today, Slate called them the “Linsay Lohan of Silicon Valley startups.” We couldn’t top that comparison if we tried. Now, in the absence of any successes in the gaming front, and shortly after abandoning their idea to expand into online gambling, they seem to be distracting themselves with litigation....

Google will take your call. That’s basically what Google Call Screening does. It’s a smart phone version of voicemail with an AI twist. But there’s a buzz about the new service, which Google recently announced as part of its AI-driven features and products. It fights robo calls with robo answers. Robo Calls If you are getting robo calls from everywhere you don’t know, you can blame hackers for that. When they got into billions of Yahoo, Facebook, and other accounts, you didn’t think it was just about identify theft did you?...

As you may have heard, pop star Taylor Swift recently bought TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult. It’s not a sign of a career change, though, it’s simply good business. Swift and many others are taking proactive steps to snap up embarrassing domain names before anyone else can. With the growing proliferation of Internet domains, websites have moved far beyond the .com’s of yesteryear, making it easier than ever to create a demeaning or misleading URL....

Have you been waiting for an exciting niche area of law to take your practice to new heights? If so, and you are in any way, shape, or form technically capable, you may want to consider studying up on the laws surrounding drones. The mass production of unmanned aircraft systems, more commonly known as drones, that exploded onto the market over the past few years, has heralded a whole new set of legal concerns for businesses, individuals, the general public, and government entities....

The Supreme Court has scheduled a November 10 conference to consider five of the six Obamacare appeals. By November 14, the country will know which cases, if any, have been accepted for oral arguments. The facts suggest that the justices will accept an appeal from the 11th Circuit. That case, found in favor of Florida and 25 other states, created a circuit split and has been appealed by the federal government....

Stupid, dated, and vague patents can be a nightmare for innovating companies. Just ask Google and Mark Cuban. And patent trolling, using these questionable patents, seems to be more popular than ever. That’s why the White House has repeatedly called for reform, including in this week’s State of the Union address. That’s why the House passed the Innovation Act last year. And that’s why the Senate is currently considering their own version of the bill, which has one thing that the House’s version doesn’t: Covered Business Method (CBM) Review....

When the news of the latest, and some might argue greatest, overreaching surveillance effort by the U.S. government broke, my initial response was a half-yawn. Phone records? Whoo-hooo. The NSA will now know exactly how lonely my life is. Actually, they won’t. Verizon is too dang expensive. Then we learned that more than phone numbers were involved. The NSA has been subpoenaing metadata, from phone serial numbers to GPS locations. This is more than “how many times did he call Pizza My Heart?...

So you’ve decided to go solo? As you already know, it’s tough out there, and getting clients can be a real chore. But now that you’re committed, you’re faced with a question that you may not have even considered when you decided to embark on this journey: “What kind of business entity am I?” You have many choices, but unless you’re a tax expert, making the right one can be a real challenge....

Every time employees leave, there’s a risk that they take some valuable trade secrets along with them. The case of Sergey Aleynikov serves as a good reminder of this. Aleynikov was a programmer for Goldman Sachs before he left to start up his own trading firm – using trading algorithms purloined from the Wall Street firm. He was convicted of stealing “secret scientific material” last Friday. Aleynikov’s much publicized case serves as an important reminder that one of the jobs of in-house counsel is to zealously guard the proprietary information of the company....

If last week’s global ransomware attack last week is any indication, then President Trump’s executive order on cybersecurity is just about on time. Fortunately, the ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers from Taiwan to the United Kingdom missed most of the United States. And while a president’s order may not stop all cybersecurity breaches, it is a good sign that the president, whose main form of communication seems to be Twitter, is trying to do his part for the security of that and other online platforms....

The big question for every ride-share driver’s lawyer (of employee versus independent contractor) may not be any closer to getting answered by the federal court as the big driver class action case covering the issue has finally settled. Due to the way the case unfolded, this settlement only includes a small fraction of Uber’s drivers. Namely, the ones that are not subject to Uber’s arbitration agreement. It might seem like a drop in the bucket for Uber, but the recently announced $20 million driver settlement has the potential to be a big hit for the company....

When you see another lawyer’s email address, do you judge them on it? If not, you might start after reading this. Apparently, some lawyers believe that the @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or @aol.com accounts should be kept personal, and that a lawyer’s email address should always be an @your-law-firm-name-here.com type address. However, this belief isn’t always correct, and could lead many lawyers down a primrose path of being hacked for using a garbage email client that lacks adequate security....

Two cases. Both involve abortion protests. Both have time/place/manner restrictions via a buffer zone, keeping protestors away from their intended location. One law, content-neutral, survives. The other? We’ll see. Therein lies the lesson, municipalities – mask your ordinances in content-neutral draperies, and they’re far more likely to survive. Protestors were picketing a Planned Parenthood official’s home. The City of Winter Park responded with this gem of an ordinance [PDF}: Notice the lack of the word “abortion” or any other message-specific content there....

Thinking about expanding into a new legal practice area? Well, you may want to think about incorporating tax law into your practice. Unlike personal injury, employment, or family law, the one area of the law that every American adult has to deal with is tax law. And with new tax laws constantly being passed, along with the complex nature of tax laws in general, there are many people out there needing the assistance of a good tax attorney....

Courts move slowly, as Chief Justice Roberts noted in his State of the Federal Judiciary Report earlier this year. Yes, he knows that the Court needs electronic filing and video recording, but for vague or unspecified reasons, they’re just not ready for that yet. Now that we think about it, all courts at every level have weird anachronisms that shouldn’t exist anymore, or practices that just plain don’t make sense. We’ve assembled a list of five things courts need to stop doing in the year 2015....

Smartwatches. They’re coming at us in waves, with Google’s friends pushing two to market at the recent Google I/O conference and a third one set to follow soon. That’s not to mention the dozen or so that have already been released by the likes of Samsung, Qualcomm, and others. And rumors of Apple’s iWatch continue to proliferate, with many expecting it to arrive on store shelves later this year. Why? Does anyone, outside of the core group of hardcore tech geeks, really want one of these things?...

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Jurors always are admonished by judges not to conduct any independent factual research with respect to the cases they are considering. In this way, the rules of evidence will be adhered to and jurors will only be permitted to evaluate evidence deemed admissible and relevant by the judge. But what about lawyers? How much sleuthing can they do with respect to the potential and actual jurors for their cases?...

When I was in law school, course materials repeatedly referred to “Google or Bing,” as in, don’t use them for legal research. It was a combo that was, literally, laughable. Bing? Almost no one used Bing back then. And that’s a problem, according to the European Union. With Google having a virtual lock down on the Internet search market – it controls around 65 percent of U.S. searches, but over 90 percent of searches in Europe – it has enormous power to control where Internet users end up....

By now, we’ve all heard of patent trolls, but now is a good time for us to visit its lesser known cousin, the trademark bully. And yes, just like copyright bullies and the patent troll, they’re not particularly loved. The reasons for their existence, unsurprisingly is related to the complexities of Intellectual Property practice. Are you (or your company) a trademark bully? To find out, take a look at the list of symptoms below....