E-Commerce Law Briefs: Week of March 29, 2010

It took the U.S. Navy 17 months to inform employees of the Naval Facilities Service Center in California that their social security numbers had been inadvertently released.

Armed with new monitoring technology, the US Copyright Group has filed suit on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers against 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders.  The MPAA and large U.S. studios have expressed interest in the litigation but want to see if ISPs would be cooperative before considering similar tactics.  (Of course suing individual infringers in this way, as opposed to the developers of the technology which permit the infringement, is a potential public relations nightmare.  In December 2008, after suing 35,000 individuals over illegally downloaded music, the RIAA announced that it was abandoning such mass litigation).

Each weekend, E-Commerce Law Briefs provides a brief summary and commentary on recent legal news affecting e-commerce businesses.