Through his commercial Web site, home improvement guru Bob Vila recently became the nation's first target of the new federal anti-spam law.

Following the lead of their American counterparts, Canada's biggest music producers recently asked the courts to order Internet service providers to identify customers who illegally swap songs on the Internet.

In the 17 years since the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was enacted, courts have ruled in hundreds of cases involving the illegal release of subscriber information by Internet companies. But only a handful of decisions have dealt with such information being improperly obtained by government officials. A federal court ruling issued last month ' castigating two Fairfield, CT, police detectives for using an unsigned warrant to attain AOL subscriber information ' is just the fourth such opinion,

A company that operates numerous music Web sites will have to pay the largest civil penalty levied to date over violating COPPA, and the Federal Trade Commission is apparently serving public notice that it intends to vigorously enforce the privacy rules.

Realizing the sizable impact of revenues from Internet sales, key states such as New York and California now require taxpayers to declare any tax they owe on out-of-state purchases.

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The U.S. music industry recently sued 531 more individuals for online copyright infringement through anonymous "John Doe" styled suits. The RIAA, continuing to cite digital piracy as a major cause of slumping CD sales for the third year in a row, announced that it filed five separate lawsuits against 531 users of undisclosed Internet Service Providers.

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Several years ago, businesses like WebSideStory began offering dedicated Web-tracking services. These services can capture and analyze many aspects of Web traffic and create a multitude of customized reports. Such digital market research has become indispensable to many online businesses. (Its use has also raised many concerns about privacy, which are beyond the scope of this article.) On the other hand, it offers significant, yet largely unrecognized, benefits to trademark attorneys in their efforts to assist clients. This article briefly outlines some of the ways that trademark attorneys can utilize this data.

After someone electronically lifted embarrassing e-mails from Diebold Inc. and posted them online, the company responded with a tactic that more and more companies are using to put a lid on Internet distribution of sensitive information: Diebold sent cease-and-desist notices to organizations hosting Web sites and forums that had published, or even linked, to the e-mails. The messages portrayed participants in Diebold's electronic voting business confirming their critics' worst nightmares about security vulnerabilities. Information may want to be free. But specialists say that sending such notices under the 5-year-old DMCA succeeds, in the vast majority of cases, in promptly curtailing online distribution. The technique is so effective, critics contend, that it is often abused in situations where no copyright protection applies or ' as with the Diebold case ' there would be a strong fair use defense.