The government argued that attaching the tiny device to a car’s undercarriage was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored. Thus, the technique was “reasonable,” meaning that police were free to employ it for any reason without first justifying it to a magistrate, the government said.

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In fact, State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), the law’s author, is not willing to go down so easily after waging an eight-year legislative and legal battle that aimed to restrict the sale of some of the industry’s most popular games, like Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto.

“We’ll comb through it and see if there’s something that will pass constitutional muster,” Yee’s chief of staff, Adam Keigwin, told me. “If not, we’ll wait until there’s a change in the makeup of the court.”

Keigwin added, “It’s certainly something the senator is considering.”

Yee currently represents California’s District 8, which includes San Francisco and San Mateo Counties, and is now running for mayor of San Francisco — all areas rich with videogame publishers and developers.

The court, in a 7-2 ruling, said the law violated First Amendment free-speech protections, but four justices left the window open for new legislation that would not violate the constitution. [Here's the full opinion of the court.]

In particular, Justice Samuel Alito indicated the language is too vague to rule accurately, but he would welcome a new version that would address how violent videogames affect youths.

“I would not squelch legislative efforts to deal with what is perceived by some to be a significant and developing social problem. If differently framed statutes are enacted by the States or by the Federal Government, we can consider the constitutionality of those laws when cases challenging them are presented to us,” he wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented, was more blunt: “I would hold that the law at issue is not facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and reverse and remand for further proceedings.”

Still, the videogame industry, including the Entertainment Software Association, which was the lead party in the case, considered the ruling a victory.

John Riccitiello, who is chair of the ESA and CEO of Electronic Arts, issued a statement: “Throughout American history, every new creative medium has to fight to establish its rights. Like books and film, videogames have had to face down censors and stand up for creative freedom. This was a long, hard, expensive fight, but it pulled together the developers, publishers and fans into a powerful political coalition. There will be other censors, other challenges. But now we’ve got an army in the field to stand up for the rights of game developers and players.”

The original legislation was passed six years ago and signed into law as Assembly Bill 1179. It called for the prevention of the sale and rental of violent video games that “depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel,” to people under the age of 18 years.

Retailers who violated the act would have been liable for up to $1,000 for each violation.

In a statement, Yee said: “Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children. As a result of their decision, Wal-Mart and the video game industry will continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of our kids’ mental health and the safety of our community. It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children.”

“Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an 18-page opinion, which was joined by four other justices.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito concurred in the result but expressed some disagreement with the majority’s opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer dissented.

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The Winklevii want the high court to invalidate their previous multi-million dollar settlement over the founding of Facebook because Facebook didn’t tell them its true valuation at the time. They have tried and failed to get the settlement appealed three times.

Here’s the press release:

Howard Rice Clients Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra To Seek U.S. Supreme Court Review

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 16, 2011 – After the Ninth Circuit today denied rehearing en banc in the ongoing dispute, the law firm of Howard Rice announced that its clients, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, intend to file a Petition for Certiorari with the United States Supreme Court in the ongoing dispute with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Lead appellate attorney Jerome B. Falk, Jr., said, “The Ninth Circuit’s opinion creates a conflict between Ninth Circuit precedent and the decisions of other federal courts on two issues.

The first is the Court’s holding that a party who is defrauded into entering into a settlement agreement cannot challenge the contract on the ground of fraud. Federal and state courts have long held that a settlement founded on fraud must be set aside. The Court’s decision conflicts with that body of precedent.

The second issue is the Court’s holding that a routine agreement to hold statements made in a mediation confidential bars proof that Facebook committed securities fraud in the mediation. Numerous federal precedents, and the text of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act, hold that an agreement to directly or indirectly waive rights under federal antifraud provisions of the securities laws is void. The Panel’s decision conflicts with that body of precedent.”

Settlements should be based on honest dealing, and courts have wisely refused to enforce a settlement obtained by fraudulent means. The Court’s decision shut the courthouse door to a solid claim that Facebook obtained this settlement by committing securities fraud. Our Petition to the Supreme Court will ask the high court to decide whether that door should be reopened.”

The Howard Rice team includes Jerome B. Falk, Jr., Sean M. SeLegue, Shaudy Danaye-Elmi and Noah S. Rosenthal.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

It seems Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Don Quixote twins of the digital age, have tilted at yet another legal windmill unsuccessfully.

So now, after losing another court challenge to overturn a previous court challenge, they’ll have to settle for $65 million.

Actually, $100 million, which is how much shares in Facebook have appreciated since the pair and also Divya Narendra settled with the social networking giant.

Said the ruling from the U.S. Circuit of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in part:

The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. And the courts might have obliged, had the Winklevosses not settled their dispute and signed a release of all claims against Facebook. With the help of a team of lawyers and a financial advisor, they made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity. For whatever reason, they now want to back out. Like the district court, we see no basis for allowing them to do so. At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.

The end? Say it ain’t so! BoomTown, for one, will miss those big lugs.

Not so much Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, especially since the pair allege the tech wunderkind stole the idea for the start-up while a student at Harvard University.

After much legal mishegas, they got $20 million and 1.25 million shares at a price of $8.88 each.

And that’s more than enough, said court to the the Winklevii–it’s their eternal nickname in Silicon Valley now–and they can’t back out of a settlement they made in 2004.

As for the specifics, the three-judge panel struck down every Winklevoss argument:

- They said the terms of the Facebook deal introduced after mediation were typical.

- They said Winklevii should have been sophisticated enough to understand valuation.

- They said Winklevii couldn’t use the sealed mediation settlement documents to argue their case.

It’s true, but it’s also sad to see it all over, since all the litigiousness between Zuckerberg and the Olympic rowing brothers has been so dramatic that it was the subject of the almost Oscar-winning movie, “The Social Network.”

But maybe they can go to the Supreme Court! One can dream!

And with their latest loss and all the Google machinating against Facebook, who’s up for a sequel: “Geek Wars: The Empire and the Vii Strike Back.”

In a statement, Colin Stretch, deputy general counsel of Facebook said: “We appreciate the Ninth Circuit’s careful consideration of this case and are pleased the court has ruled in Facebook’s favor.”

Here’s the full ruling:

08-16745

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that e-commerce retail sales totaled $44 billion in the fourth quarter last year, up from $38 billion a year earlier. E-commerce sales now account for 4.3 percent of total retail sales (which include lots of things that don’t get bought online, like new cars, gasoline and restaurant meals), up from one percent a decade ago. For the year, e-commerce sales totaled $165 billion.

Many of those online purchases didn’t have any sales tax attached to them. Long before the Internet was on anybody’s radar, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t require that retailers without a physical presence in a state, like mail-order companies, charge sales tax on their behalf. In recent years, states have tried to find ways around that ruling. Last fall, for example, Texas said an Amazon.com distribution center in Dallas counted as a physical presence and sent the retailer a past-due sale tax bill for $269 million. This month, Amazon said it is shutting down the distribution center as a result of Texas’s “unfavorable regulatory climate.”

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Should free and open communication—particularly free and open communication via the Internet—be considered an unalienable right? How much control should a government or Internet service provider wield over its citizens’ communications?

This is very much a global issue and, while it’s easy to say that every citizen should have “uncensored access” to the Internet, such a statement is too glib, and here’s why.

If we have learned anything in Internet security from the past 10 years, it’s that a completely open Internet can make it as difficult to communicate safely and effectively as a closed one. The past decade witnessed a meteoric rise of unwanted traffic in the form of spam and cybercrime, made possible through cheap and easy Internet connections. Should spammers engaged in mass-marketing (as well as other more nefarious activities) be able to communicate as freely and easily as Egyptian protestors? Where do we draw that line?

Second, while censorship is prominent in countries like Egypt and China, Americans face more subtle—but equally serious—concerns about the quality of our network access, with issues ranging from network neutrality to competition in access networks. Our government’s decisions affect our Internet access quality and speed. Six years ago the Supreme Court decided Internet service providers (ISPs) were under no obligation to lease their infrastructure to competing carriers. This has effectively created a near-monopoly for Internet access in many regions of the United States and left users either unable to exchange certain types of traffic (such as when Comcast blocked BitTorrent) or with flagging Internet speeds (such as when AT&T delayed its rollout of fiber to the home as part of its U-Verse offering).

Finally, even if citizens can access the Internet, they must also be able to verify information sources. It’s not just whether Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is blocked—it’s whether governments or other organizations are using such sites to spread propaganda.

All of these issues, both at home and abroad, revolve around one question: Who should be the Internet gatekeeper, and what rules should be applied at the gate? I believe the foundations of rights in the digital world rest on two pillars: transparency and choice. First, the actions of ISPs and governments should be transparent; if they take certain actions to restrict, throttle or otherwise manipulate communications or information, users must know about it. Second, users must be able to choose their ISP. If they do not like the performance or policies of a particular ISP, they should have the ability to switch providers.

Transparency is thornier than it appears. Because ISPs do not publicize the way they prioritize different kinds of traffic, we must reverse-engineer these practices with measurement tools. Even notions such as “Internet speed” are complicated and can’t be represented by a single number. Also, different users may be concerned with different performance metrics; gamers might be interested in network service that delivers traffic with the least amount of delay, while those who stream movies may care more about receiving a high quality signal with few errors.

At Georgia Tech we are working with the FCC to give consumers a better sense of whether they’re getting what they are paying for, in terms of ISP performance, and also to educate them on how they might coax better performance out of their home networks.

But in the end, transparency is only helpful if users can choose among Internet service providers. Unfortunately in the United States, users have very little choice. We must reconsider ways to make the ISP market more competitive, perhaps drawing on our own experiences in forcing competition among utility providers.

Though the events in Egypt seem far away, the central questions about information access are quite relevant here at home. Demanding that the ISP policies and behaviors be transparent—and providing users more choice in the ISPs they can use—helps ensure that everyone’s Internet is less vulnerable to the whims of a single gatekeeper.

Nick Feamster is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In 2010 he was recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his research in computer networks, and he also received a Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Feamster is featured in the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine in a multi-page exploration of tomorrow’s Internet.

In late November, Twitter started contributing its DMCA takedown letters to Chilling Effects, the online clearinghouse jointly organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many universities and law schools.

Chilling Effects says it received records of 11,500 total takedown notices in 2010, as of Dec. 15. Major contributors include Google, Yahoo and Digg.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick flagged the Twitter takedowns, noting that many of them are for tweets that contain links to copyrighted material. Why go to Twitter and not the content host itself? he asks.

Chilling Effects founder Wendy Seltzer said she believes Twitter has been getting the takedown notices for a while but only recently started submitting them for public posting.

Using Twitter to get out the word about content may well be a growing phenomenon. In August, BitTorrent released a tool for more easily tweeting about torrent files. A friend of mine who’s an avid Green Bay Packers fan recently told me about a Twitter account he follows to find streams of football games he doesn’t have access to on TV.

“It’s interesting that they are receiving takedowns, given that most of what they’re hosting is little 140-character bursts of expression,” Seltzer said on a phone call yesterday. “Copyright holders are pushing the complaint out further, not going after the user who hosted, or even the user who pointed, but going after Twitter because it’s made itself a central location for the collection of information.”

Seltzer said that under the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster ruling, it’s possible that users could end up on the wrong side of the law for inducing infringement by posting a link with the intent to encourage their Twitter followers to access or download infringing material. But as long as Twitter complies with takedown requests, it should be within the safe harbor rules of the DMCA, which protect providers of information tools, said Seltzer. “Twitter doesn’t have an intent to infringe, so they would have a solid argument.”

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment, citing mellowness in the office over the holidays.

A 2005 California law bans those under 18 from buying or renting violent videogames that appeal to “a deviant or morbid interest in minors.” Lower courts struck down the law, under precedent authorizing government to restrict youth from only one type of material, obscene sexual content.

In seeking the law’s reinstatement, Zackery Morazzini, a deputy state attorney general, told the court: “California is no less concerned with a minor’s access to the deviant level of violence that is presented in a certain category of video games” than it is with sexually explicit material.

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They didn’t bother to obliterate the U.S. Supreme Court. But in the real world, that’s where the $10.5 billion videogame industry faces its greatest threat. On Tuesday, the court’s nine justices will consider whether to strip First Amendment protection from violent videogames that critics say appeal to the deviant interests of children.

A 2005 California law prohibits selling or renting such games to minors based on legislative findings that they stimulate “feelings of aggression,” reduce “activity in the frontal lobes of the brain” and promote “violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.” The law never took effect because lower courts found it violated free-expression rights.

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While it seems to be a stealth launch, the new online political site for MSNBC.com, created by Hollywood production firm BermanBraun, is now up and running.

Called BLTWY–as in “Beltway,” presumably for the road that rings the nation’s capital–the striking rich-media content site is now live. (You can see it above.)

BLTWY seems to follow along the sweeping horizontal wall and extensive use of larger photos and videos that characterize BermanBraun’s popular Wonderwall celebrity site.

In May, BermanBraun and MSNBC announced the collaboration in a blog post, noting:

“Politicians have now become part of popular culture, and de-facto celebrities, attracting considerable media attention. BermanBraun and the Msnbc Digital Network announced a partnership to create an original destination site which will go beyond policy and polls to explore the celebrity side of politics…It will take you inside the beltway to explore the lives of politicians as celebrities, giving politics the Wonderwall treatment.”

BLTWY is definitely aimed at meshing celebrity and politics and has a lot of interactive elements, such as polls and Facebook Connect.

In fact, the main feature at the moment is a diva depiction of the Supreme Court.

The slick site also appears to be developed in HTML5, rather than using Adobe (ADBE) Flash technology and fits to the entire screen with the homepage remaining in a persistent manner.

BermanBraun has already created several sites for Microsoft (MSFT) and its online properties. Wonderwall debuted in 2009 on its MSN portal, where its women-focused Glo also resides.

That ruling, based on the judge’s interpretation of 1986 electronic communications law, would seem to establish a narrow definition of privacy for social-networking users in New York. In California, on the other hand, a judge interpreted the same statute to confer privacy on material posted to Facebook and MySpace. The rulings in each case only apply to the areas covered by their courts, unlike rulings made in federal appeals court or at the Supreme Court, which typically apply more broadly.

Forbes.com blogger Kashmir Hill spotted the differing legal rulings in New York and California. In the New York lawsuit, as Hill notes, a woman sued the manufacturer of an allegedly defective office chair, seeking damages for injuries sustained in 2003 when she fell out of her seat. Lawyers for the chair company sought to review material the woman posted to Facebook to determine whether her injuries were as severe as she claimed.

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Ryan Calo, senior research fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University Law School, has been trying to answer that question. This summer, he released a draft of a paper titled the Boundaries of Privacy Harm that is set to be published in the Indiana Law Journal next year.

Calo spoke with Digits about privacy harm and how it applies in the digital world. His condensed comments are below.

Why do we need to define privacy harm?

If you look at regulations of abortion or sodomy or contraception, the Supreme Court looked at these as privacy issues. But a lot of people would say you can’t regulate sex between two people of the same gender, not because it happens in private but because it’s an equality issue. … In order to surface these values, we need to draw a line and say that not everything is privacy.

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Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. To have goods, services and promotions tailored to our personal circumstances and desires, we need to divulge information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.

This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we’re losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs—to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don’t. Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.

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You can read all of U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton’s decision at the bottom of the post, where I’ve embedded the ruling. Short version: Stanton buys Google’s longstanding argument–that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects YouTube from Viacom’s claims. And he seems to agree with Google (GOOG) on almost every point. There’s very little in his ruling that Viacom (VIA) will be happy about.

Even though YouTube and Google executives knew the site had plenty of clips that violated copyright, “mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough” to support Viacom’s claims, Stanton wrote in a 35-page decision.

That’s because the DMCA, signed into law early-on in the first Web boom in 1998, grants “safe harbor” to service providers that don’t know about specific copyright violations and that fix copyright violations when they learn about them. Since YouTube relies on users to upload clips to the service and takes down clips if copyright holders complain, it’s in the clear, Stanton says.

If the ruling holds up, it’s a big blow to traditional copyright laws. Or spun another way, it’s a huge victory for technology companies using the DMCA as a defense.

Google’s statement:

Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.

Viacom’s statement:

We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis. We look forward to the next stage of the process.

So what about all of those interesting and entertaining documents both sides filed in the three-year suit and released to the public earlier this year? As I argued earlier, the bulk of them weren’t really relevant at all, and Stanton spends almost no time discussing them.

One worthwhile exception: He does use one email from Viacom attorney Michael Fricklas to help bat away the network’s complaint that YouTube was the equivalent of Grokster, the file-sharing network beaten down in a 2005 Supreme Court decision.

“The difference between YouTube’s behavior and Grokster’s staggering,” Fricklas wrote in a 2006 email. And Stanton agrees.

msj_decision

You can read all of U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood’s ruling at the bottom of the post. But the short version is that Wood, using the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision as a guide, found that LimeWire is indeed guilty of copyright violations. In her words:

LimeWire… (1) is aware that LimeWire’s users commit a substantial amount of copyright infringement; (2) markets LimeWire to users predisposed to committing infringement; (3) ensures that LimeWire enables infringement and assists users committing infringement; (4) relies on the fact that LimeWire enables infringement for the success of its business; and (5) has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.

LimeWire is unusual among post-Napster, post-Grokster file-sharing operations in that it operates out in the open, in the U.S. The company, based in New York City and owned by investor Mark Gorton, actually sells a smattering of music itself with the blessing of some of the smaller music labels. But while the company has been engaged in a long back-and-forth with the big guys, it has never reached a settlement.

Meanwhile, almost all of the music available on the service (93 percent, according to a study used in the lawsuit) and even more of the stuff actually downloaded (98.8 percent, via the same study) is protected by copyright and should not have been there. Court documents state that LimeWire generated revenue of $20 million in 2006.

LimeWire does tell its users they shouldn’t steal music. This is the warning you get when you try to do so:

But that’s not enough, Wood ruled. And certainly not when the service was going out of its way to court users searching Google (GOOG) for free tunes. From her ruling:

LimeWire conducted a marketing campaign through Google AdWords, whereby Google users who entered certain search queries, such as “replacement napster,” “napster mp3,” “napster download,” “kazaa morpheus,” “mp3 free download,” and dozens of other phrases containing the words “napster,” “kazaa,” or “morpheus,” would see an advertisement leading them to the LimeWire website.

The next step in the case is a June 1 conference. Here’s LimeWire CEO George Searle’s statement, which doesn’t include a vow to appeal the ruling:

LimeWire strongly opposes the Court’s recent decision. LimeWire remains committed to developing innovative products and services for the end-user and to working with the entire music industry, including the major labels, to achieve this mission. We look forward to our June 1 meeting with Judge Wood.

And here’s the end-zone dance from Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the music industry’s lobbying group:

This definitive ruling is an extraordinary victory for the entire creative community. The court made clear that LimeWire was liable for inducing widespread copyright theft.

LimeWire is one of the largest remaining commercial peer-to-peer services. Unlike other P2P services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators. The court’s decision is an important milestone in the creative community’s fight to reclaim the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce. By finding LimeWire’s CEO personally liable, in addition to his company, the court has sent a clear signal to those who think they can devise and profit from a piracy scheme that will escape accountability.

We are gratified by the court’s careful and thorough analysis of the facts and applicable law.

Bigger question: What does this mean for the music industry? Assuming Wood’s ruling stands, this one will definitely feel good for the labels, and it would have been a very big deal had they lost. But it certainly won’t help them in fighting less formally organized P2P services or those set up outside the U.S.

Arista Records Summary Judgment Opinion

“This is a very material step in our litigation against Microsoft. Put simply: i4i’s patent is clearly and unequivocally valid,” i4i chairman Loudon Owen said in a statement. “Even though Microsoft attacked i4i’s patent claims with its full arsenal, the Patent Office agreed with i4i and confirmed the validity of our ’449 patent.”

The XML technology covered by the patent might be “obscure,” as Microsoft (MSFT) has argued, but that doesn’t mean it’s not patentable. This being the case, Microsoft would seem to be liable for its transgression: Incorporating i4i’s “obscure” patented technology into Word 2003 and Word 2007.

A tough break for Microsoft, which was ordered last year to pay i4i $200 million for doing so.

The company’s only recourse now it seems is to appeal to the Supreme Court, something it appears to be considering, according to Director of Public Affairs Kevin Kutz. Said Kutz: “We are disappointed, but there still remain important matters of patent law at stake, and we are considering our options to get them addressed, including a petition to the Supreme Court.”

Hence, today’s brief flurry of reports echoing Radar Online’s scoop that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was “seriously considering stepping down” for “personal reasons.”

The story, which was published early this morning, is not true. And it was ignored until lunchtime on the East Coast, when the Drudge Report picked it up. At that point it became open game for a host of smaller sites, which picked it up with varying degrees of credulity.

Radar has since reversed the story, noting that it “has obtained new information that Justice Roberts will NOT resign. The justice will be staying on the bench.” The site has yet to update its headline, though, which is still trumpeting its “exclusive.”

Radar is a media gossip site/magazine that has gone through several permutations over the years. In its current incarnation, it’s an online-only property owned by American Media Inc., the people who bring you the National Enquirer, among other properties.

But while the Enquirer has a history of getting some big political stories right over the years, Radar doesn’t. It generally sticks to stuff like photos of the “Jersey Shore” dudes taking off their clothes. Probably a good strategy going forward.

Still, if you’re among those who, say, make their living working for an ad-supported media outlet, it sure is nice to see this sort of thing: Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente jacking up his 2010 U.S. ad market estimates from no growth to a 3.5 percent bump.

That’s a reflection of an “incrementally buoyant picture,” DiClemente says in perfect Wall Street deadpan. Why the muted optimism? “We believe corporate America must and will return to market its products and services.”

Interestingly, DiClemente sees the largest increase coming not from Web advertising, but traditional TV ads, pushed up in part because of the Winter Olympics and next fall’s election season. Last week’s Supreme Court decision didn’t hurt either.

That helps explain why DiClemente has also raised his price targets for Viacom (VIA) and News Corp. (NWS) (which owns this Web site). Click on the table below to see a full breakdown of his predictions:

The U. S. Supreme Court has put a halt, at least temporarily, on plans to let Google’s (GOOG) video site stream coverage of the “Proposition 8″ trial, which kicked off today in a San Francisco courtroom.

California voters approved Prop. 8, a ban on same-sex marriages, in last fall’s elections, and the court is now being asked to overturn the law. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker was going to allow the trial to be covered, on a tape-delayed basis, on the world’s biggest video site.

But the Supreme Court this morning granted a temporary order overruling Vaughn. The court didn’t explain its reasoning, according to the Los Angeles Times, but perhaps we’ll hear more down the road–the ruling is only supposed to remain in effect until Wednesday.

In the meantime, if you want nearly real-time coverage of the proceedings, you still have other options. The San Jose Mercury News, for instance, is covering the trial from the courtroom. Here’s reporter Howard Mintz’s report on Judge Walker’s explanation of the Supreme Court decision:

Walker is beginning the proceedings by discussing his effort to broadcast the trial by posting it on the court’s Web site by using the YouTube platform. He just noted the court has received more than 138,000 responses to the proposed court rule change that allows broadcast, most in favor. The judge informed the court that only 32 people opposed it, prompting chuckles when he said “the returns are in.”

Other options include Twitter, of course. The American Foundation for Equal Rights, the advocacy group that filed suit to overturn Prop 8, has a hashtag here, for instance.

And if you really want video, here’s another option–an anti-Prop 8 video starring the likes of Jack Black and John C. Reilly:

Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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There has been a surge in companies receiving patents for ways of doing business, from Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) one-click checkout to Priceline.com Inc.’s (PCLN) reverse auctions, since a 1998 court decision expanded the scope of processes that could be patented.

The Supreme Court must now determine whether such swaths of modern business activity deserve patent protections, thereby opening the door to infringement lawsuits, or belong in the public domain, depriving their inventors of monopoly profits.

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