The U.S. Congress should consider a "safe harbor" from legal action for consumers using works protected by copyright as it launches a long-term effort to revamp copyright law, some advocates said Thursday.

Embedded YouTube videos don't infringe copyright under current German law, but they could violate European rules, the German Federal Court of Justice said on Thursday.

A federal court in New York has denied class certification to copyright owners in an infringement lawsuit against YouTube over unauthorized hosting of content, stating that copyright claims have only superficial similarities.

European civil liberties representatives on Wednesday advised the European Commission's trade department that the intellectual property chapter should be left out of the current trade negotiations with the United States and that the deal should not be agreed in secret.

France should stop cutting off the Internet access of those accused of illicit file sharing, and close down the agency that polices online copyright breaches, according to a government-commissioned report.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that an abstract idea is not patentable simply because it is tied to a computer system, signaling what one judge described as the "death" of software and business method patents.

The U.S. Department of Justice's copyright infringement case against file storage service Megaupload is "prosecutorial overreach" based on a misreading of U.S. law, the site's lawyers argue in a white paper released Tuesday.

A 33-year-old man was sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison by a German court for running the torrent site torrent.to between December 2005 and April 2008.

We are standing in a parking lot in the city of Malmö, southern Sweden, one of the many places Peter Sunde now calls home. The sky above us is grey, as usual at this time of year. Just as the parking meter spits out our ticket, a young man driving much too fast on a motorcycle roars up behind us. He is followed by a police car, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing.

Over the past year, patent battles have been fought by tech companies in courtrooms all over the world. The litigation is far from over though, however, and will continue throughout 2013. This is what's at stake on the patent battlefield in the near future.

Some of the most memorable IT-related quotes were uttered in courtrooms this year, which involved a steady stream of legal challenges about intellectual property. In no particular order, these are some of the comments that stuck with us as 2012 winds to a close.

The US presidential election result leaves President Barack Obama in the White House and maintains the balance of power in Congress. In many longstanding technology debates, policy experts see little movement forward, although lawmakers may look for compromises on a handful of issues.

Samsung took a step toward finding a kind of "pax tabletica" with arch-foe Apple in an Australian court last week, offering to remove features from its Galaxy Tab to avoid a court ban on sales of the device in that country. But what's really interesting about the case isn't the technical litigation, but the underlying attempt to define how much of a product's design is actually protected under existing, fragmented international laws.

Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.