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This is hardly a surprise, but similar to the Joel Tenenbaum case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset (the other person sued for copyright infringement for using a file sharing system), has lost again. The appeals court (8th Circuit) has ruled that $9,250 per song infringed is perfectly reasonable and that the judge in the case, Michael Davis, erred in calling for a new trial after the initial jury verdict (the first of three). There were a number of procedural issues here, and it's worth pointing out that Thomas-Rasset herself more or less asked the court to bring back this first verdict and focus on the Constitutionality of the damages amount. So, the whole mess with the three separate district court trials sort of gets swept under the rug. However, the court simply isn't buying Thomas-Rasset's claim that the statutory damages are unconstitutionally punitive and a violation of due process. Basically, it says that the fact that statutory damages are completely out of whack with actual damages doesn't matter, because the point of statutory damages is that they're disconnected from actual damages on purpose (because, in theory, they're put in place because actual damages are difficult to assess).

A ruling handed down yesterday by Germany's highest court represents a blow to rightsholders in their quest to clamp down on illicit file-sharing. The court ruled that the parents of a teenager who had made available more than 1,100 songs on file-sharing networks can not be held responsible for their son's infringements, nor be required to monitor or hinder his online activities.

The Court ruled that the parents had met their parental obligations when they informed their child of "basic do's and don'ts" including that file-sharing copyrighted content online is illegal. Furthermore, the Court ruled that the parents were not required to monitor their child's online activities nor install special software to restrict his online behavior. This would only be required should the parents have "reasonable grounds" to presume that their child would engage in infringing activities online.

The practice contradicted what Mr. Verrilli had told the Supreme Court last year in a case challenging the law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Legalizing a form of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance, the law authorized the government to wiretap Americans’ e-mails and phone calls without an individual court order and on domestic soil so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at a foreigner abroad. A group of plaintiffs led by Amnesty International had challenged the law as unconstitutional. But Mr. Verrilli last year urged the Supreme Court to dismiss the case because those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped. In making that argument, he said a defendant who faced evidence derived from the law would have proper legal standing and would be notified, so dismissing the lawsuit by Amnesty International would not close the door to judicial review of the 2008 law. The court accepted that logic, voting 5-to-4 to dismiss the case. In a statement, Patrick Toomey, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which had represented Amnesty International and the other plaintiffs, hailed the move but criticized the Justice Department’s prior practice.

Still, it remains unclear how many other cases — including closed matters in which convicts are already service prison sentences — involved evidence derived from warrantless wiretapping in which the National Security Division did not provide full notice to defendants, nor whether the department will belatedly notify them. Such a notice could lead to efforts to reopen those cases.

a bail revocation application is underway which could put back behind bars as early as next week.

Last week it was revealed that his New Zealand legal team had backed out of their arrangement to defend the Megaupload founder.

A full report on developments isn’t possible due to a news blackout, but Crown Prosecutor Christine Gordon told the Court that an application had been made to have Dotcom’s bail revoked after an apparent breach of conditions.