But there are signs that some judges are starting to recognize this imbalance and -- more importantly -- to do something about it in their rulings. Here's what Graham Smith, a UK lawyer and blogger, had to say on this trend recently:

These have been a hectic couple of weeks for copyright. Ten days ago the EU Court of Justice published the UsedSoft decision, which will have us thinking in a completely new way about exhaustion of rights online. On Thursday this week the Canadian Supreme Court delivered five separate copyright judgments on subjects ranging from fair dealing to communication to the public, each in its separate way reinforcing a more user-centric, less author-centric, approach to copyright.

Smith points out that one thing the European and Canadian decisions have in common is a desire to assert "technological neutrality" -- the idea that the move from an analog to a digital world shouldn't see the balance of traditional copyright tipped towards one side or the other:

Both the ECJ and the SCC [Supreme Court of Canada] kicked back hard against what they perceived as imbalance between hard copy and digital copyright outcomes. The ECJ strove to achieve 'functional equivalence' between a fully paid permanent download and a sale on physical media. It said that what would otherwise be a communication to the public would be converted into a distribution to the public if a 'transfer of ownership' (defined in economic rather than legal terms) had taken place. The ability to rely on the first sale doctrine in order to acquire second-hand software applied in equivalent situations, regardless of whether the transactions took place on physical media or by download.

The SCC invoked a similar concept of 'technological neutrality' in several of its judgments, two of which together held that the right of communication to the public applied to streaming but not to downloads.

Let's hope this new recognition of the essential nature of users' rights deepens and spreads to other countries where copyright in the digital age remains seriously out of kilter.

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Running through a truncated likelihood of consumer confusion mutli-factor analysis, the court says PissedConsumer isn't deVere's competitor, there's no chance PissedConsumer will "bridge the gap" to become a competitor, deVere didn't allege bad faith and deVere didn't allege actual consumer confusion. The court bypasses the remaining factors, something an appeals court probably won't do. Instead, the court says that judicial precedent has held that gripe sites don't create consumer confusion.

Rebecca sent some other recent examples of trademark claims failing on a motion to dismiss, including The Hangover II case, Forest River v. Heartland RV and Architectural Mailboxes v. Epoch.

In reality, the high courts and low courts have been reintroduced in silence. When Sony BMG broke into millions of computers worldwide in 2005, rootkitting them to disable their ability to run instructions that would violate Sony’s own interpretation of its copyright monopoly, Sony was sentenced to send out marketing material for its own products and no individual executives were charged. When LulzSec members were arrested for breaking into systems in the singular, they get the low court treatment.

When a commoner is accused of violating the copyright monopoly, in some draconian countries like France, they can be sent into social exile without even getting a trial in the low court. In contrast, the noble Voddler (a video-on-demand service) violated the GPL egregiously by using free software to build its service — but without resharing the code, thus violating the copyright monopoly that GPL builds on, and for thoroughly commercial purposes. They were never prosecuted. In contrast, they are now speaking at hearings in parliaments on how successful they are.

"[W]hether or not this case settles is not my primary concern. Although Plaintiff's business model relies in large part upon reaching settlement agreements with a minimal investment of time and effort, the purpose of the courts is to provide a forum for the orderly, just, and timely resolution of controversies and disputes. Plaintiff’s wishes to the contrary, the courts are not merely tools for encouraging and exacting settlements from Defendants cowed by the potential costs of litigation and liability."

At the District of Columbia federal courthouse, which is home to the lower courts and the U.S. Court of Appeals, I had to check my cellphone at the door two weeks ago. And in the Los Angeles federal courthouse, I was ordered, by a judge, to turn off the Wi-Fi signal emitted from my HTC Evo in December.

But in San Francisco, the judiciary allows Wi-Fi connected computing inside its courtrooms, from either a cellphone or a computer. Live blogging or tweeting is commonplace there.

That is the status quo with the ongoing Barry Bonds criminal trial in San Francisco. What’s more, the San Francisco federal courthouse even provides free Wi-Fi in many courtrooms.

Most virtual searches are not Fourth Amendment searches or, if they are, they can usually be carried out on little or no suspicion if they do not involve interception of communication content. Given the huge amount of information that virtual searches provide about everyone's activities and transactions, traditional physical searches--with their cumbersome warrant and probable cause requirements--are much less necessary than they used to be. American citizens may eventually live, and indeed may already be living, in a world where the Fourth Amendment as currently construed is irrelevant to most law enforcement investigations. Technological developments have exposed the fact that the courts' view of the Fourth Amendment threatens the entire edifice of search and seizure law.