Any record industry executive would have been weeping into his cornflakes today as he perused the newspapers. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) was reported everywhere as having handed victory in a battle to privacy activists and file-sharers by ruling that ISPs do not have to hand over subscriber details in file sharing or any other civil cases.

The problem is that these reports have missed the point. What the ECJ actually said was that national governments can, effectively, do what they like on the issue.

Therefore, if Spain wants to rule that file-sharer details can only be revealed in criminal cases, it can. However, if UK courts want to hold, as they do, that file-sharer details can be revealed in all cases, then that's fine too.

It all boils down to the slightly complicated question that the ECJ was asked. Telecoms firm Telefónica argued that Spanish law prevented it revealing user details except in criminal cases. Music rights-holders' group Promusicae, though, said that law was inconsistent with the EU directive protecting copyright.

The Spanish court asked the ECJ whether Spain was allowed to have a rule preventing disclosure in civil cases. The ECJ said that such a rule was okay. The ECJ did not say that all member States had to prevent disclosure in civil cases to protect privacy rights as has been reported.

The court, very even-handedly, said that the issue put two crucial rights in fundamental opposition: an internet user's right to privacy and a music producer's right to protect its copyright.

Each side in the argument had an entire EU directive on its side, and the ECJ was asked to choose between them. It didn't, instead telling EU nations that they could create their own laws provided they balanced the two rights properly.

Spain, then, was allowed to keep a law that said names can only be revealed in civil cases, as long as its law overall kept a proportional balance between the right to privacy and protection for copyright holders. And here's the nub of the issue, it is a criminal offence to host copyright-infringing material in Spain for profit or on a commercial scale, even if not for profit.

The music industry executive should be marginally happier now, but the one industry it could unsettle is the telecoms business. What practical effect will the ruling have in the hard world of commerce?

One potential effect is forum shopping.

UK music fans generally can't subscribe to ISPs in Spain, because Spanish ISPs don't lay cables along the streets of Britain or install kit in British telephone exchanges (and satellite broadband is an expensive solution for free downloads). But they might use a Spanish web host to store copyright-infringing files. Entire companies could relocate to countries that would not order names to be revealed in civil cases, to pick up this business, and countries that do reveal names, such as the UK, might find their ISP businesses suffering.

So what might be relief for the record industry executive might well become a headache for his counterpart in a telecoms firm. But probably only a minor headache.

For the first time in my life I feel sorry for insurance salesmen. The Financial Services Authority has taken a big red pen to their use of the words "save up to £200 with our insurance" in the text of their sponsored links. That's because the FSA is concerned that these advertisers fail to substantiate the percentage of people actually receiving the savings. So the FSA says these ads are misleading.

There are two things I don't get. First, is anyone actually misled by such ads? If I see the words "save up to £200," I have enough shopping experience to know that I'm unlikely to save the full £200 but that some people will (or should). I don't object to the ad when I learn that I won't save the full £200. (I'm carrying 3 points on my licence; I don't expect the ad to know that). It's surely just a ubiquitous advertising puff. Second, how do you write compelling copy while also substantiating that £200 saving in two lines of text, each with a maximum of 35 characters? "Four per cent of customers saved £200" won't make me click.

The US patent system is under fire from all sides. While open sourcers hate it just for existing and for granting philosophically distasteful tech monopolies to giant companies, big business attacks it for being too slow and backlogged, while other businesses claim that it awards patents too easily and broadly.

The giant organisation admits that it is in trouble: Commissioner for Patents John Doll told OUT-LAW Radio that if he closed the doors to new patent applications tomorrow it would be two and a half years before the current backlog is cleared.

What to do? Well the US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) has taken a bold step. Kind of. It has embraced the mania of the day, the theory of the wisdom of crowds, and will attempt to harness all of our knowledge to help improve the quality of patents.

The new scheme relates to prior art, which is the name given to evidence that a patent application is not new, that someone had invented or patented something similar in the past.

The USPTO has signed up to a scheme invented at the New York Law School which throws open the search for prior art to the world. You can now look at a patent application online and submit anything you know of that would count as prior art and invalidate the patent application.

This is a fantastic idea, solving a number of problems. It reduces the workload of, and pressure on, beleaguered patent examiners by providing them with relevant, free information. It increases the likelihood that patent hoodwinkers will be caught, which in turn reduces future patent litigation, an expensive and time consuming process that has been the death knell of many a fine company.
Best of all, it does it in an open, transparent way which involves the technological community and gives them both responsibility and credit for the smooth operation of the system, while allowing the USPTO to stay firmly in charge.

There is, though, a problem. When I said that the USPTO has embraced the scheme, that was a lie. Their's is more of the kind of half-hug you give awkwardly at parties when you don't know someone that well.

They have signed up to the system, but only on a 12-month pilot, which is fair enough, and only for those who opt into the system.

There is a legal snag, you see. Third parties are barred by law from submitting prior art to the USPTO, except for in a very short window early on in the process. So participants in the trial have to waive their right not to have prior art submitted by other people.

Imagine that you are a wily inventor or purchaser of the rights to technology looking to slip in a quick patent application to put your proto-business on sound footing. You know that your application is maybe a little too broad, or a little too close to an existing one. But there are millions of patents out there and only one examiner with just 17 or 18 hours allocated to your application. What are the chances of them finding that one little patent from 20 years ago?

Are you going to sign up to the Peer-to-Patent system? No chance.

So the plan is a good one, and could radically improve the quality of an under-fire patent system. But if the full programme adopts the same mealy-mouthed approach and allows patent applicants to opt out, it will wither and die as only the least controversial applications will pass through its filtering system.

This project is designed for the controversial, the sneaky and the dishonest. Everyone's application should be forced through the system, otherwise it is a waste of the wisdom of an already tetchy crowd.

While the press were salivating over story-of-the -summer Facebook and the gee-whiz news that its founder Mark Zuckerberg was being sued for allegedly stealing the whole idea from some college acquaintances, it went un-noticed that Facebook is itself suing - that's right, those same college acquaintances.

ConnectU was a startup social networking site whose founders say they employed Zuckerberg. Their suit claims he took their ideas and built Facebook out of them.

But in the background lies another suit, in which Facebook accuses ConnectU of hiring programmers to break into its system, read address books and send ConnectU marketing material to Facebook members' friends, apparently on behalf of those members.

The system was designed, says Facebook, to work with other sites as well as its own, but it said that some elements of it were specifically designed to evade detection by Facebook.

The case stumbled on a dispute over jurisdiction, but Judge Richard Seeborg, who will also oversee the high-profile case between Zuckerberg and ConnectU, said that the Californian court's reach could extend to some Washington-based defendants.

That ruling in itself could set a vital precedent for ecommerce cases.

Seeborg said that jurisdiction can be asserted over people who take action against a person or company even if they don't know that person's physical location.

That is a law change that could have wide ramifications, but in this dispute most people's eyes will be on just how heated and vicious the series of cases between ConnectU and trend-of-the-hour Facebook will get.

Google is facing yet another challenge to its advertising system, AdWords. The system has been challenged before by brand holders such as GEICO and American Blind & Wallpaper Factory (ABWF), but the latest is from one of the world's most famous companies, American Airlines.

The beef is simple in outline, but complex in detail. Google sells ads beside your internet searches which are related to whatever you typed into its search box. The problem is what happens when you type American Airlines or AA into that box.

AA wants only its ads to appear. Google sells the right to display ads next to that term to whoever buys the space. That is the conflict.

A US court ruled in one previous case that using trademarks as triggers was OK, but using those trademarks in the ads themselves was probably a no-no. That, said the judge, caused consumer confusion. We were just about to get blessed clarification on whose fault that would be when Google settled in secret with the other half of that case, GEICO.

Another case involving ABWF has had an initial hearing but will proceed to a full jury trial.

AA is clearly not happy with the outcome of the GEICO case, and has been pretty stiff in its pre-trial verbiage about Google's policies. It says its trademark policy is "manifestly deficient" and it wants a jury trial and punitive damages.

Google has not yet fought this battle with as large, as experienced and as deep-pocketed an opponent as AA. It has another possible adversary, though: Google Europe.

While Google allows US and Canadian trademarks to be bought as keywords, its rest-of-the-world policy allows no such thing. In Europe, it blocks the use of trademarks even behind the scenes as keywords.

"Google appears to have the ability to structure and configure its programming to stop this misuse of the Amercian Airlines marks because it has already implemented procedures with respect to European internet users," says the AA case.

So Google will have to defend in court a policy that its European arm does not practice against a battle-hardened business veteran from a cut-throat competitive and highly litigious industry. If Google hasn't grown up yet, it will soon.

Paris Hilton might have an ally in Prince Charles. The celebrity heiress is in court in Los Angeles fighting over a collection of personal items that she left in a storage facility. These are alleged to include steamy videos starring the 25-year-old as well as her passport, diaries, medical records and other items. It seems that a bill went unpaid and the storage company sold her belongings. The new owner launched a web site that offered voyeurs the chance to see the lot - for a monthly fee of $39.97.

What's interesting (aside from Paris's failure to learn from past mistakes with video cameras) is her argument for getting the web site off-line: fear of identity theft, according to press reports. A preliminary injunction has been granted but it is being challenged and a possible result is that the passport is banned but the videos go back online, unless someone steps forward to claim copyright in the footage.

If Paris sued in a UK court (the US web site may have British customers, which may establish jurisdiction), Prince Charles could be her knight in shining armour. He succeeded late last year in keeping his private notes out of the newspapers, citing a breach of confidence. It was an important case and the same argument that was used by Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas in their wedding photo dispute. There is no general privacy right in either the UK or the US but breach of confidentiality is fast becoming established over here as the next best thing.

It has not been a good start to the year for Intel.  Not only has the chip-maker announced that its fourth quarter earnings are down 39 per cent, its stock has fallen over the last couple of days, it has slashed its workforce substantially (by mid 2007 the number will be nearly 10,000) but it is also at the heart of a major competition enquiry.

To make matters worse the EU Commissioner is now under pressure from EU anti-trust experts to make a decision on whether Intel's behaviour has contravened competition law.  The answer the experts are looking for is "Yes".  Such a claim has been levelled at Intel by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) who has said that Intel has abused its dominant market position. 

So what could this mean for Intel?  Abusing a dominant market position is a pretty serious offence under competition law.  Any company doing so would be held in breach of Article 82 of the EC Treaty and potentially subject to a substantial fine.  It is not so long ago that Microsoft showed us just how large this fine could be. 

In 2004 Microsoft was fined €497m for abusing its "near monopoly" on computer operating systems.  In addition to this hefty fine, the Commission gave the corporation 90 days in which to make available a European version of its Windows operating system to PC makers without a media player and 120 days to give programming codes to rivals in the server market to allow them to develop their products in order that they would have full "interoperability" with desktop computers using Windows.  Again in July last year, Microsoft received a second fine of €280.5m for continued non-compliance with the 2004 order which compelled it to share complete interoperability information.

Even though it is important to preserve competition in the market place to sustain business and for the sake of the consumer, there perhaps comes a point at which it seems that a competition judgment is the price a company will pay for attaining success and a dominant position in the market.  For years of hard work and careful manufacture, Microsoft and perhaps Intel too, are asked, as a result of competition rulings, to share their trade secrets with the very organisations they have worked so hard to surpass.  Which begs the question: at this level is competition law really able to protect consumers, or do companies just see it as a success tax?"

CDs are going up in price. So said Andrew Gowers, albeit he said so quietly. Press attention focused on the former FT editor's call for a right to make private copies in his year-long review of intellectual property. But little has been made of the details.

He says the price of music should rise to reflect the fact that people copy music to their iPods. As for your existing collection of MP3s, you'll need to buy a licence. That's what the man says, if you read the detail of his 150-page report. Will everyone shell out a few hundred pounds for what's already on their hard drives or MP3 players? No chance.