A US court has ruled that users have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their internet surfing records and that police must obtain warrants from higher than usual courts in order to force ISPs to hand over records.

"The Supreme Court of New Jersey became the first court in the nation yesterday to rule that people have an expectation of privacy when they are online, and law enforcement officials need a grand jury warrant to have access to their private information..."

Most of Moscow's ISPs blocked PirateBay's BitTorrent tracker. That forced me to thought about privacy, anonymity and freedom-related questions in Internet. And possible solutions to stay free and protected from moneyloving ISPs and their "rulers".

European Court of Justice gave a preliminary opinion that will have far-reaching implications in the fight against overaggressive copyright monopoly abusers. It is not a final verdict, but the advocate general’s position; the Court generally follows this. The Advocate Generals says that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly.

"Prodded by the music industry and government, some Internet service providers are reluctantly exploring the adoption of an old-fashioned shunning ritual as the ultimate 21st century punishment: banishing errant online users.

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers.

UPC, one of Ireland's largest internet service providers, has won a major legal victory against four of the world's most powerful record companies over the much-contested issue of online music piracy.

Switzerland's Federal Administrative Court yesterday decided that a government organisation's renewal of its proprietary software licences without a public tender does not harm the business interests of open source software service providers.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a "two-speed" internet, letting service providers charge content makers and customers for "fast lane" access. In other words, welcome to the slow lane!