The Recording Industry Association of America previously said that suing people who shared music on peer-to-peer networks was an unprofitable endeavor. But it wasn't clear until this week just how big the RIAA's losses were.

The defunct XY Magazine, aimed at gay teens and young gay men, used to promise subscribers that it would take extraordinary steps to protect their privacy. This February the magazine's owner declared bankruptcy. At the time, he filed papers stating that disclosure of subscription lists or information about users collected online would threaten public safety. Two creditors, however, apparently claim they are entitled to that information.

In the latest court ruling addressing Web users' right to remain anonymous, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld an order unmasking three Web users, but preserving the confidentiality of two others.

When Republican Sharron Angle of Nevada was running for her party's nomination for Senate, her campaign's Web site proudly proclaimed her right-wing views. She touted her intention to promote Nevada as the "nuclear energy capital of reprocessing spent fuels for the United States." As for immigration, Angle's Web site said she not only wants to use the military to strengthen the country's borders, but also thinks that even legal immigrants should be denied any benefits, like subsidized college tuition. On abortion, the Tea Party candidate announced that she was not only "pro-life," but had introduced "life-preserving …

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the Recording Industry Association of America appear to be headed back to court this October for yet another trial -- the third so far -- stemming from her having shared music on Kazaa.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Cleland in Michigan tossed a cybersquatting and trademark infringement lawsuit against Lawrence White, the owner of the gripe sites CareerAgentsNetwork.biz and CareerAgentNetwork.biz. Now Cleland has gone further and ordered plaintiff Career Agents Network to pay White $30,000 in attorney's fees for having brought the case.

It's understandable that individuals aren't pleased when they conduct vanity searches on their names only to discover a newspaper article about an old arrest as the top Google result. It must seem particularly aggravating when the charges were later dropped or reduced. But as much as the search results might bother people, there's at least one thing certain to make the situation worse: asking a judge to order the newspaper to remove its archives. Such a questionable request all but assures that the arrestee's name will forever be linked with not only the original charges, but also with a futile …

A federal judge has put the brakes on a copyright enforcement outfit's effort to subpoena identifying information from Time Warner about more than 4,500 subscribers who allegedly used BitTorrent to download Uwe Boll's "Far Cry."

Controversial behavioral targeting company Phorm lost $30 million last year and $49 million in 2008, the company said in a financial report issued this week. Phorm serves ads to users based on information about their Web activity gleaned from Internet service providers using deep packet inspection technology.