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Would be patent-trolls searching through commit logs for ideas to patent sounds like a scare-story on a local news station, and the goods news is that there aren't any cut-and-dry cases of this happening yet. However, Tech Dirt's Mike Masnick has found two suspicious instances of patents that may be "borrowing" technology from open source projects. In one case, IBM made the case that it had "improved" on prior art and was granted a patent. Is this something open source developers should be worried about?

Most of the talk surrounding immigration reform in the U.S. these days is coming from my home state of Arizona where controversial laws like Senate Bill 1070 have the nation divided. For entrepreneurs, there are other laws - mainly those surrounding work visas and green card acquisition - that are in dire need of reform if the nation is going to rebound on the back of innovation. Thursday night, the tech community was again reminded of this need when Robert Scoble posted a blog and video interview with a pair of foreign-born entrepreneurs who shared their varying but equally troubling stories of immigration.

We reported in June that the Attorneys General of 30 U.S. states held a conference call to discuss investigating Google. Google's capture of private information while using Street View cars to gather mapping information has led to a host of legal troubles globally for the company.

Now, this group of Attorneys General has grown to 38 (plus the District of Columbia). It has scheduled a Friday meeting with Google representatives and today it sent the company the latest in a long list of questions it wants answered.

It seems that every week we hear about another patent lawsuit between tech companies claiming the exclusive rights to various technologies and methods. With large corporations like Apple, Google and Microsoft frequently defending patents in court, smaller companies may get the idea that patents are the best way to protect intellectual property. A recent survey from the University of California, Berkeley found that, in fact, the opposite trend is appearing among these types of companies. The largest reason? Cost.

Despite the rollback on some of Facebook's heavily-debated privacy changes, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary still has questions for Facebook's CEO. On Friday, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter requesting additional information on Facebook's privacy activities.

"(W)e would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders -- particularly in circumstances in which the user did not expressly opt for this type of information sharing."

The state legislature in the U.S. state of Louisiana has passed a law adding extra time for committing a crime with an online map. Senate Bill 151 adds at least one year to the sentence of any criminal found guilty of using an "Internet, virtual, street-level map" like Google Maps with Street View to commit a crime.

"'Internet, virtual, street-level map' means any map or image that contains the picture or pictures of homes, buildings, or people that are taken and dispensed, electronically, over the Internet or by a computer network, where the picture can be accessed by entering the address of the home, building, or person."

This is a follow-up to our earlier post on RFID and rustling. This is the first draft of a blueprint for a grassroots method a rancher could use, free of federal involvement, to employ RFID against rustling. This is not the finished product.

Federal livestock-tagging systems have been tried before, most prominently in the wake of the mad cow disease scare. They have all been disastrous. Ranchers disliked the perceived imperiousness of a top-down implementation and resented the expense. Distrustful of federal authority, which has resulted in high-handed dismissal of ranching concerns at times, the centralized nature of a national data bank was also rejected. Organizations that do not exist on the federal level have also tried to encourage a centralized tagging protocol. The same issues inhered.

The United States 5th District Court in New York handed down a ruling today regarding the licensing rates and terms that may be charged for streaming television and radio content to mobile devices.

In US v. ASCAP, music performance rights publisher ASCAP sued MobiTV a company that provides methods for delivering media over wireless and broadband networks. It asserted that, after the company would not assent to its proposed rate structure, MobiTV subsequently owed ASCAP $41.3 million.

There's been a lot of anxiety provoked (and money made) predicting a "parade of terribles" in the workplace as a result of social networking sites and employee blogs. While there is no doubt that these sites provide additional opportunities for employees to be distracted from getting their work done, I contend that not all that much has changed.

Employees that are wasting their time on social networking sites today were gossiping at the water cooler in yesteryear, and the solution is the same: thoughtful policy implementation and vigilant managerial oversight.

United States lawmakers have spent a year preparing draft legislation for a law that would define and limit privacy for advertisers and Internet companies. The legislation will govern methods of taking information from users online and using that information to target advertisements to them. On Tuesday, they will present the draft legislation.

The timing is good for such an announcement given the worry over, among other things, Facebook's recent changes that have caused fresh worry over privacy.