Does $75 trillion even exist? The 13 record companies that are suing file-sharing company Lime Wire for copyright infringement certainly thought so. When they won a summary judgment ruling last May, they demanded damages that could reach this mind-boggling amount, which is more than five times the national debt. Manhattan federal district court judge Kimba Wood, however, saw things differently. She labeled the record companies' damages request "absurd" and contrary to copyright laws.

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Social media has come crashing into the courtroom. And along with this newer form of evidence come questions about how to best collect, preserve and use it.

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What's at issue is control, obviously, and the great lengths to which some will go to maintain, it even as they benefit from the wide-open, free-flowing viral information torrent of the Internet. These copyright acquisitions are not primarily motivated by the desire to exploit the works and make money, but rather by the desire to stop the public circulation of texts and images the new owners do not like.

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Remember U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous line about hardcore pornography? Stewart said it was tough to define, "but I know it when I see it." The quip came to mind after a ruling last month by the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a trademark infringement case involving Internet advertising keywords. In essence, the Ninth Circuit concluded that there's no strict standard for determining infringement in the Internet age, so judges have to know it when they see it.

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The use of new technology makes peoples' efforts to keep Internet behavior private more difficult, has given rise to renewed claims from consumers of unlawful intrusiveness by Internet data-collectors, and has revived the argument that such behavior unlawfully violates privacy expectations.

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Highlights of the latest intellectual property news from around the country.

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Last year, for the first time, the issue of downstream liability surfaced in the law of trade secret misappropriation. In 2010, a California appellate court held in <i>Silvaco Data Sys. v. Intel Corp.</i> that a software licensee did not know or acquire the secret source code the manufacturer used to make the product and, as a matter of law, it could not be liable for trade secret misappropriation.