Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov is a free man after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York deemed that stealing source code isn't the same as stealing physical property, and therefore Aleynikov was wrongly charged under the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA). If Aleynikov is to be punished, it will have to be based on copyright law and other intellectual property (IP) legislation, the judge said. Let's retrace Aleynikov's steps.

It doesn't take much for online comments to quickly get out of hand, and there are certain subjects that inevitably attract trolls ready to defend their stance or platform of choice. PC (Windows) versus Mac, AMD versus Intel, politics, religion, abortion, and other high octane subjects could all be fun to debate, but almost always quickly end up derailed by name calling and other Internet tough-guy nonsense. The solution? Most sites just drop the ban hammer if someone gets too far out of line, but the state of Arizona has written a bill that would essentially make it a crime to be a troll.

Do you remember what you were doing in 1987? It was the year the Simpsons appeared for the first time as a series of shorts on The Tracy Ulman Show, Bow Wow was born, and both Larry Bird and Magic Johson were still in the NBA. It also happens to be the year an incident led to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted a year later, nearly a decade before Netflix was founded and 16 years before Facebook launched. Yet this quarter-of-a-century old legislation is the reason why Netflix hasn't released a Facebook app in the U.S.

There's an old saying about throw stones from a glass house, which we imagine is just one of the many dangers of living in an ill-conceived all-glass abode. Hail, birds, robbers, and all kinds of dangers abound, but we digress. The reason we're bringing this up is because MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom claims that a bunch of high-ranking U.S. government officials are also members of the website that got him in hot water.