• Cuffed links. The Spanish parliament has passed what is commonly known as the "Google tax," although it's technically not a tax and doesn't apply solely to Google. Rather, it's an intellectual property law requiring online news aggregators to pay fees for describing and linking to stories published by Spanish newspapers; failure to pay can expose the aggregator to penalties up to $758,000 (€600,000). Moreover, according to The Independent, the Spanish law characterizes these fees as an "inalienable right" (derecho irrenunciable) that "overrides any concept of 'fair use'." Not surprisingly, the new law has sparked criticism, with Gizmodo observing that this makes Spain essentially "the first country in the world to charge for linking online."
  • Pass the passcode. Can prosecutors force a criminal defendant to hand over the passcode to his cellphone if they think there's incriminating evidence on the phone? A trial judge in Virginia said no in an interesting case late last month. The judge said it's one thing to force the defendant to be fingerprinted – even if the fingerprint is what unlocks the phone, prosecutors can do that. It's another thing entirely to compel production of the passcode, because that would require handing over a form of "knowledge" in violation of the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination. The case involved a man charged with attempting to strangle his girlfriend; prosecutors believed that the phone's built-in video camera may have recorded what went on in the altercation between the couple.
  • Treasure tweets. Under its recently announced partnership with Twitter, IBM will be tapping into a truly vast source of data – the nearly 500 million tweets that run across Twitter's network every day. Many consider this to be a treasure trove of information that can help businesses to better understand consumer sentiment and to tap into trends before they become evident. IBM plans to find patterns in the Twitter data and to sell its findings to clients. This is a pretty big deal for IBM, as it is training 10,000 workers in the art of finding trends and patterns in the data and making them useful to businesses. Although IBM and Twitter may make for an odd couple, big data analytics require big databases, and few databases are as big as the one that Twitter is making available to IBM.

Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

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