supreme court

The Supreme Court is re-examining the hotly disputed issue of video game violence. In an ongoing case, it's deciding whether to uphold a California law that would ban violent games being sold to kids under 18 years of age. The law, passed in 2005, ... would have introduced a $1,000 fine for any retailer caught selling "violent" games to minors. However, it wouldn't have stopped parents or other adults buying games and letting children play them. The law soon came under challenge and in 2009 California's highest court rejected it. That ruling said that there was no conclusive evidence that playing ... (view more)

One of Microsoft's last hopes of escaping a $290 million fine for MS Word patent violations has once again fallen by the wayside. It means the company must either hope for an unlikely hearing at the Supreme Court, or pay up the cash. The case ... involves XML, a variant on web programming language HTML. Whereas HTML only covers the formatting and presentation of data, XML allows for description and classification of the content of that data. Series of Appeals End in Failure Microsoft Word lets users open XML documents, but the technique it uses to do so was ruled to have breached a patent by ... (view more)

Virginia's tough anti-spam law has bitten the dust after the state's Supreme Court reversed its own decision in the case of a man who sent ten million messages in just two months. As we reported in March, Jeremy Jaynes was the first American jailed ... for sending spam messages in the US. Though a North Carolina native, he was charged in Virginia because that's where the AOL servers he used are based. Jaynes got a nine year sentence (three years for each of the three counts). Though sending unsolicited messages isn't technically illegal under state law, he was busted because he didn't give his ... (view more)

A North Carolina man has become the first person jailed in the US for spamming, despite his attempts to cite the First Amendment. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld a nine year sentence given to Jeremy Jaynes, though only by a 4-3 margin. It's ... thought he sent ten million spam messages in July and August of 2003 alone, though the original prosecutors only presented evidence of 53,000 messages sent over a three-day period (it's a felony crime to send more than 10,000 spams a day). He was found guilty on three counts, and given a three year-sentence for each. Jaybes was prosecuted in Virginia, ... (view more)