Apple’s filing doesn’t try to defend the five publishers the DOJ has accused of colluding to fix prices. In fact, it basically throws them under the bus, pointing out that if there was a price-fixing conspiracy among its co-defendants — as alleged — they kept it secret from Apple.

Meanwhile, the government’s lawyers are going to have a hard time proving that Apple violated antitrust laws because the company’s market share in the e-book business before the launch of the iPad was essentially zero.

They can’t make a case against Apple for collusion because whatever the publishers may have said to one another, there’s no evidence that Apple conspired with its competitors.

They can’t even use as evidence the blunt quotes taken from the Steve Jobs biography because they are hearsay.

The one element of the government’s case that seemed to give Apple’s lawyers a hard time was the charge that the most-favored-nation provision Steve Jobs added at the last minute was “designed to protect Apple from having to compete on price at all, while still maintaining Apple’s 30% margin.”

In its response, Apple’s legal team can’t even bring itself to name the provision, referring to it repeatedly as MFN. But they manage to shoot some holes in the government’s argument, pointing out, among other things, that the 30% cut Apple takes is hardly pure profit margin. It costs money to run the iBookstore, and while Apple doesn’t claim to lose money on e-book sales, that’s not where it gets the big bucks.

You can get the gist of Apple’s filing in those first six introductory paragraphs. The rest is an item-by-item refutation of the government’s case and a summary of Apple defenses, should it come to that.

For Java, the question of whether there’s a FRAND licensing obligation under antitrust law is a non-issue: FRAND licenses for clean-room implementations are already available.

The Java example shows that FRAND is different from a fair use exception in some ways. While fair use denies that a creator is entitled to a payment, FRAND licenses are typically royalty-bearing. And it’s no less important to consider that FRAND licenses are often made available only to those who create a fully compliant implementation of a standard (whether a near-compliant implementation qualifies for FRAND under antitrust law is a separate question).

If Google made Android fully Java-compatible, it would be entitled to a FRAND license. In light of that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Judge Alsup to depart from the standard for copyrightability (by a factor of 1,000 or more) or to invoke “fair use” when there actually is a FRAND option.

FRAND also has an advantage to implementers. For example, FRAND licenses relating to a standard typically cover all categories of intellectual property — including patents that are essential (i.e., they are inevitably infringed by a reasonable implementation of a standard). Patent law doesn’t have a “fair use” exception, and if you want to talk to a patent office about the public policy considerations Google puts front and center in the Android/Java case, good luck: patents are granted based on strictly technical criteria, and public interest exceptions only come into play under exceptional circumstances (such as in the event of an epidemia or national security concerns).

Antitrust law can’t impose a FRAND licensing obligation in connection with every API, but it doesn’t have to. If there are viable alternatives to an API, there may not be a FRAND obligation, but in that case, market dynamics will give the more available and affordable API a competitive advantage. But in those cases in which the market can’t take care of itself, competition law can come to the rescue.

Just to be clear: I don’t categorically reject competition-related arguments as far as intellectual property law itself is concerned. As far as my personal position is concerned, I’d like patent examiners to have to justify the grant of a patent in light of the fact that a patent is a (time-limited) monopoly. But we have to make a proper distinction between the way we’d like the law to be shaped and the way in which it can be reasonably applied today.

Google’s position on competition and IP is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, Google endorses and now directs Motorola’s abuse of standard-essential patents. On the other hand, Google wants free-of-charge and unrestricted access to certain Java-related IP and twists and turns the case law, suggesting that fair use cases established an actually non-existent conflict between copyrightability and compatibility and advocating that copyright holders should become victims of their own success. Right in the middle between those two extremes there’s a balanced solution called FRAND.

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

A German court has ruled that Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent which allows long text messages to be divided into parts and then reassembled by receiving handsets.

It marks the first patent ruling against Google since it completed its takeover of Motorola.

Microsoft can now demand a German sales ban of Motorola products, although it signalled it would prefer a licence fee.

Google said it may appeal.

Google’s chief executive had previously said that his firm bought Motorola and its patents “to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.

Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the banks leading its flotation are being sued by disgruntled shareholders.

A writ, filed in a Manhattan court, alleges that Facebook’s revised growth figures were not disclosed to all investors.

US financial regulators have already said the Morgan Stanley may have questions to answer over the disclosure of information ahead of Friday’s float.

The bank, lead underwriter to Facebook, said it fully complied with the rules.

The lawsuit claims that defendants concealed from investors during the flotation marketing process “a severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts.

It is the latest problem to dog one of the most anticipated stock market listings of recent times.

The flotation was disrupted on Friday by technical glitches on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The share price has since slumped amid worries that the company was over-valued by advisers marketing the float.

On Tuesday, the leading financial regulator in Massachusetts issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley as part of an investigation into whether its analysts selectively disclosed revised revenue forecasts for Facebook.

Now, a group of investors has issued a class-action lawsuit alleging that Facebook revenues were revised down because of a surge in the number people using mobile devices for apps and connection to websites.

Morgan Stanley has not yet commented on the latest lawsuit.

Google did not infringe patents owned by software developer Oracle, a jury in a California court found on Wednesday.

The Silicon Valley giants had fought over whether Google used Oracle’s Java programming language in its Android mobile operating system.

Two weeks ago the same jury ruled that Google infringed Oracle’s copyright, but could not agree whether Google’s actions constituted “fair use”.

The internet search giant maintains Android was built “from scratch”.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringed its intellectual property rights.

Google said it does not violate Oracle’s patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, which is an “open-source”, or publicly available, software language.

Without a finding against Google on the “fair use” issue, Oracle cannot recover the up to $1bn (£637m) in damages it was seeking.

The case focused not on using the Java programming language itself, but rather the use of 37 application programming interfaces (APIs) which help developers create software on the platform.

With internet innovation moving fast, it is common for software writers to adapt APIs that mini-programs use to “talk” to one another.

The jury concluded that Google infringed on 37 copyrighted APIs but it also agreed that Google demonstrated that it was led to believe it did not need a license for using Java.

A German man who alleges he was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Khaled al-Masri claims he was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured.

He wants Macedonia to recognise its part in the alleged kidnap.

Mr Masri has already brought several cases against the US and German authorities, without success.

An attempt to sue the 13 CIA agents in the US courts failed, and a later approach to the German authorities to request their extradition was dropped.

His case is still pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Lebanese-born Mr Masri claims he was abducted in Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and detained for five months in Afghanistan.

He says four of those months were spent in a secret prison outside Kabul, nicknamed the “salt pit”.

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. But critics complained that this was the only cash the banks were required to pay — the rest comes in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other activities. Even that relatively small amount has proved too great a temptation for lawmakers.

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

In Texas, $125 million went straight to the general fund. Missouri will use its $40 million to soften cuts to higher education. Indiana is spending more than half its allotment to pay energy bills for low-income families, while Virginia will use most of its $67 million to help revenue-starved local governments.

Like California, some other states with outsize problems from the housing bust are spending the money for something other than homeowner relief. Georgia, where home prices are still falling, will use its $99 million to lure companies to the state.

In short: We know you’re using your role as governor to endorse belief in god and you can’t do that.

The FFRF litigants wanted previous Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations declared unconstitutional and they want to prevent further proclamations from being issued. Initially, a judge said FFRF had the right to sue on behalf of Colorado taxpayers but the governor wasn’t doing anything illegal.

FFRF didn’t like that ruling and wanted to challenge it. The Governor didn’t like that FFRF had a right to sue. So they took the case to a state Appeals court.

There, the judges said FFRF still has the right to sue.

The Governor’s people didn’t want to address the Constitutionality of the proclamations — they just said it was a part of state history. But the court said that was a lie:

There [was] no indication in the record that, at the time of Colorado’s founding or at any time before 2004, Colorado’s governors had an annual tradition of proclaiming, separately from Thanksgiving, a Colorado Day of Prayer.

Furthermore, they said, it’s not a secularized day, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It’s “avowedly religious.” The court then said “we conclude that the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations have predominantly religious content.”

The jury deciding whether Android violates Oracle’s Java-related copyrights has reached a unanimous decision on three of the four questions it is tasked with answering, but will break for the weekend and deliberate again Monday on the unresolved issue.

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it's butt ugly, but it's also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved.  An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn't come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There's no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.
So Samsung, was it worth it? Your product won't sell as well, but you won't piss off one of your biggest component customers either. I understand the motivation, but I still feel like you've sold your soul.
When Apple started patent trolling, they basically admitted they weren't going to win in an open market, and they decided to drag Samsung down with them. The crazy thing is, Samsung is letting them. They've ceded ownership of the rectangle and other common sense design traits to Apple, and did everything they could to bow down to their largest customer.
The result? A phone designed by lawyers. What a scary precedent.

The copyright phase of the Oracle v. Google trial is winding down. While the world waits for a jury verdict on the facts, the judge overseeing the case is wrestling with the complexities of the law. Oracle has argued that the “structure, sequence and organization” of the Java API is eligible for copyright protection, while Google disagrees.

On Thursday, Judge William Alsup asked each party to submit a 20-page brief answering a series of 13 in-depth questions about the Java API and the relevant precedents. Among other things, he asked the parties to weigh in on the implications of this week’s EU court decision that allowing functional characteristics of programming languages to be copyrighted would “monopolize” ideas.

Some of Judge Alsup’s comments in the courtroom in recent days suggested that he is skeptical of Oracle’s position.

Aside from a nine-line function that’s been deleted from Android, Oracle acknowledges that Google didn’t copy any code from Java. Oracle says that by copying the “structure, sequence and organization” of 37 Java APIs, Google has violated copyright law. That phrase—”structure, sequence and organization”—came up so frequently when the lawyers were arguing over jury instructions today that both sides started to refer to the concept by an acronym, “SSO.”

The overall case also involves accusations of patent infringement, but those will be dealt with in the second phase of the case. For now, the jury is just getting ready to decide the copyright claims over Java APIs. The trial, now two weeks old, may last as long as eight weeks.

What the jury won’t know

Friday was a long day in court. After the final testimony from Catz and experts in the morning, lawyers argued all afternoon about what the jury’s final instructions will look like.

There is one thing the jury won’t know: the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted at all is actually up in the air. It’s a legal gray area that will be decided by Judge William Alsup—but only after the jury gives its verdict in this case. (When that happens, even a jury verdict in Oracle’s favor could be a hollow one.) During debates over the jury instructions today, Alsup deleted a notation about how he’ll decide the “copyrightability” issue. Instead, the instructions will simply tell the jury to assume that Java API’s—which are like sets of instructions for how a programming language can be used—can indeed be copyrighted. Since that order emphasizes the importance of the APIs, it probably weighs in Oracle’s favor.

Had Glazer walked through the beaded curtain at her local psychic’s office, all of this would have remained private. But by doing it online, and by passing some of it through her work e-mail, Glazer opened the conversations to scrutiny—and even made them searchable.

As lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani sums up the case, “Glazer committed a classic miscue for employee-plaintiffs—she engaged in discussions regarding her dispute through her work e-mail account. If not for this, Fireman’s Fund may not have ever found out about the chats in question. (Note to prospective employment plaintiffs: if there is even a whiff of a dispute with your employer, you should engage in all third-party communications through your own personal e-mail accounts, on your own time, and off your employer’s network.)”

Google’s argument seemed to catch the Court off guard, and Judge Alsup then invited this motion by Google. Of course, Oracle disagrees (986 [PDF; text to follow]) (See Part II of Oracle’s filing). But Google’s point is Oracle can’t have it both ways. Oracle can’t argue that the 37 APIs “taken individually and as a unit” are covered by a copyright registration (a requirement for Oracle to bring a copyright infringement suit on them, not a requirement for copyright protection), but by insisting that the Java copyright registration is a collective work, Oracle seems to have stepped on themselves. Nowhere are those 37 APIs, either individually or as a unit, subject to a unique copyright registration; the only thing Oracle registered was the copyright in Java as a whole.
The determination of this issue in favor of Google will either (a) result in the dismissal of the copyright claims or (b) provide the support for Google’s de minimis and fair use copying defenses.

An American citizen who says he was illegally detained and repeatedly tortured in a US navy jail has asked the Supreme Court to reinstate his lawsuit against senior US officials.

Jose Padilla accuses current Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials of breaking the constitution.

Padilla was convicted of terrorism-related offences in 2007.

In January, a court upheld an earlier ruling dismissing the suit.

Padilla’s allegations relate to the more than three years from 2002 in which he was held an “enemy combatant”.

His civil lawsuit against several serving and former US officials alleges he was tortured by being kept in darkness and isolation, deprived of sleep and religious materials, and kept from family and lawyers.

In 2011 his case was dismissed by a US judge, who said the law did not offer clear guidelines on the detention of enemy combatants.

Padilla’s appeal against the decision was rejected in January this year by the US Appeals Court, which ruled that the officials in question had partial immunity.

The current appeal to the Supreme Court is being brought on Padilla’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and his mother, Estela Lebron.

Padilla is currently serving a 17-year sentence after being found guilty of helping a US-based al-Qaeda cell.

He was arrested in Chicago on his arrival on a flight from Pakistan in 2002, after allegedly having undergone terrorism training in Afghanistan.

President George W Bush declared him an enemy combatant a month later, saying he possessed valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda.

Taken to a navy jail in South Carolina, he was held there for more than three years.

Padilla’s lawsuit argues that the US authorities created the category of enemy combatant to circumvent suspects’ normal constitutional rights.

When Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement in August 2010, it accused the maker of Android of violating seven patents covering Java technology.

Yet five of the seven patents were dropped from the case, as one by one they were rejected upon reexamination by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Now, one of those five rejected patents has gained new life—on Sunday, Oracle informed the court that the USPTO has granted Oracle’s request to reverse the invalidation of patent #5,966,702.

Nine of the 23 claims made in the patent (representing all of the claims Oracle was asserting against Google) were confirmed by the USPTO as patentable technology. Oracle may now be able to assert three patents against Google, rather than just two. The revived patent covers a method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging Java class files in a way that improves handling of memory.

The number of patents Oracle can assert against Google had nearly been reduced to one, as one of the two patents remaining in the case (#RE38,104) had been preliminarily rejected by the USPTO upon a re-examination requested by Google. Oracle has asked the USPTO to examine this patent once more, and is asserting the patent against Google in the meantime.

The USPTO’s decision to give the ‘702 patent new life is also preliminary, but weighted in Oracle’s favor. The USPTO office last Thursday issued a “notice of intent” to confirm the patentability of the asserted claims. Oracle provided the notice to the court handling the Android case yesterday. Although it seems likely Oracle will try to assert the patent once more, the court filing did not say whether Oracle intends to do so.

Android Inc. founder Andy Rubin took the witness stand Monday in the patent and copyright infringement lawsuit Oracle filed against Google. Rubin answered questions related to e-mails he wrote in 2005 and 2006 on the topic of Java licensing.

According to reports from ZDNet and CNet, Oracle lawyer David Boies quizzed Rubin about e-mails in which Rubin discussed whether to take a Java license from Sun Microsystems. Rubin came to Google when it purchased Android in August 2005, and he still leads development of the mobile operating system. Sun was purchased in 2010 by Oracle, which promptly sued Google over the use of Java in Android.

In an Oct. 11, 2005 e-mail presented in US District Court in San Francisco, Rubin wrote to Google founder Larry Page that “My proposal is that we take a license that specifically grants the right for us to Open Source our product. We’ll pay Sun for the license and the TCK [Technology Compatibility Kits].”

One of the trial’s key issues is whether programming languages such as Java and their related APIs (application programming interfaces) can be copyrighted, with Oracle arguing that Google needed a license to use Java APIs. According to CNET, Boies “established that Rubin knew that he didn’t need a license for the Java programming [language], but that the e-mails made clear during that period of Android’s development that he thought Google would need a partnership with Sun or a TCK license from Sun, and the java.lang APIs were subject to copyright.”

Teller, the silent half of the well-known magic duo Penn and Teller, has sued a rival magician for copying one of his most famous illusions. The case promises to test the boundaries of copyright law as it applies to magic tricks.

In “Shadows,” a spotlight casts a shadow of a rose onto a white screen. When Teller “cuts” the shadow on the screen with a knife, the corresponding parts of the flower fall to the floor.

A Dutch magician with the stage name Gerard Bakardy (real name: Gerard Dogge) saw Teller perform the trick in Las Vegas and developed his own version. Bakardy sells a kit—including a fake rose, instructions, and a DVD—for about $3,000. To promote the kits, he posted a video of his performance to YouTube and prepared a magazine ad. (With the video down, the link points to screenshots from the video filed by Teller in his lawsuit.)

Teller had Bakardy’s video removed with a DMCA takedown notice, then called Bakardy to demand that the magician stop using his routine. Teller offered to buy Bakardy out, but they were unable to agree on a price. So Teller sued Bakardy last week in a Nevada federal court.

This is big news. Huge. The judge in the Oracle v. Google trial, the Honorable William Alsup, has reached an important decision. He has decided he will rule on whether or not APIs can be copyrighted, not the jury.
The news came with the final report from our reporter on Day 4’s coverage . I’ve added it there in Update 5, but it’s significant enough that I wanted to highlight it, to make sure you don’t miss it. This is, in my view, an important win for Google, in that it ensures that Oracle will not be able to confuse a non-technical jury that also presumably doesn’t know much about the law. I know a lot of you have been wondering when Judge Alsup was going to realize that the buck stopped with him, and it has happened.

Samsung has finally answered Apple’s second US patent infringement lawsuit with patent infringement counterclaims of its own. On Wednesday, Samsung filed a response to Apple’s lawsuit over the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, claiming that iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and Macs infringe one or more of eight patents. Two of those patents have been declared essential to 3G wireless standards, however, which could complicate the European Commission’s investigation of Samsung’s alleged abuse of standards-related patents.

Among the eight patents are three that were recently acquired in 2011, perhaps with the intent to use them against Apple. All of the patents apply to Apple’s lucrative mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

However, Samsung’s continued use of FRAND-pledged patents may only serve to strengthen Apple’s complaint that the company is abusing its position as part of the standards-setting body behind 3G wireless networking. The European Commission is currently investigating Samsung for allegedly reneging on its promise to license 3G-related patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.

Many of Oracle’s claims and presentation in this case will be based on misdirection and creating a false understanding of Oracle’s rights and Oracle’s right to restrict the activities of others. The Oracle position is in direct conflict with the previous statements and actions of Sun upon which Google relied. If Google can keep the jury straight on these points, Oracle will be shown to have significantly overreached in bringing the copyright claims in this suit.

Twitter’s momentous announcement yesterday that it would only use its patent portfolio defensively was received with wide acclaim by the tech world. With two small changes, Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA) could actually completely change the landscape of software patents.

The case was brought by the family of Azzam Rahim, a naturalized American citizen. According to their lawsuit, Mr. Rahim was arrested by intelligence officers of the Palestinian Authority during a 1995 visit to the West Bank. The officers took him to a prison in Jericho, where he was tortured and killed, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Rahim’s family sued under the 1991 law, which imposes liability on “an individual” who “subjects an individual to torture” or “subjects an individual to extrajudicial killing.”

To determine the meaning of “individual,” Justice Sotomayor consulted dictionaries, as the court often does in trying to pin down the ordinary meanings of terms. They showed, she said, that “individual” usually means “a human being” or “a person.” Federal laws and court decisions, she said, also used the term in that sense.

She went on that the very law at issue several times used “individual” in senses that could apply only to people. “Only a natural person,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “can be a victim of torture or extrajudicial killing.”

Science fiction author John L. Beiswenger has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against game publisher Ubisoft in a Pennsylvania district court, claiming that the Assassin’s Creed series illegally copies ideas and themes he established in his 2002 novel Link.

Beiswenger’s novel, as excerpted heavily in the suit (PDF), focuses on the titular Link device, which lets users relive the “ancestral memories” of long-dead relatives through DNA. The author alleges that this is a bit too close for comfort to Assassin’s Creed’s Animus devices, which are key to the series’ sci-fi-meets-historical-assassinations plotline.

On Friday, EFF went to court to argue that innocent Megaupload customers like Kyle Goodwin should be able to get their lost files back. We were particularly concerned because the government, which had originally seized the files and still apparently holds all of Megaupload’s financial assets, had argued that it had no obligation to make sure the files of innocent Megaupload users were returned and, in fact, believed that they could be destroyed .

The good news is that the court ordered all the parties – Megaupload, EFF, Carpathia (the service provider), the MPAA, and the government – to work together to devise a plan that protects everyone’s interests. The court plainly did not adopt the government’s troubling view and ultimately everyone else in the hearing, including the MPAA, seemed to agree that destruction of the files would be problematic (you can read more about the hearing here and here ).

Of course, the situation poses some big logistical hurdles. First, there is a huge amount of data here – more than 25 petabytes. Second, the parties have diverging views on what should be done even if they agree on preserving the data. Who should store the data? Where should it be stored? And of course, who will pay for that storage and any plan to allow users to retrieve their files?

But we are encouraged by the seeming consensus that it’s only right that innocent users like Mr. Goodwin get their property back. We’ll continue to do our best to make sure that happens.

The chiefs of Apple and Samsung have agreed to meet in a bid to resolve a patent case between the two in a California court.

This was after a US judge ordered the firms to participate in a settlement conference led by a magistrate judge.

The two companies have sued each other over technology used in smartphones and tablet PCs.

The two firms are fighting patent cases in various other countries as well.

Apple has now publicly responded to accusations that it colluded with publishers to fix e-book prices. In a statement released late Thursday, the company says the launch of its iBookstore in 2010—along with the original iPad—not only brought competition to the market, it also broke “Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.”

“The [Department of Justice]’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true,” Apple told several news outlets. “The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.”

After nearly a year of waiting, a federal judge has granted Apple’s motion to intervene on behalf of iOS developers in a legal shakedown initiated by patent troll Lodsys. Specifically, Apple will now be allowed to argue that iOS developers—who were sued over alleged patent infringement for using iOS’s in-app purchasing APIs—do not infringe because Apple already obtained a license to the patent in question.

Anyway, here’s the important take-away:

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it’s on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)

It doesn’t matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers’ Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon’s death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to “disrupt” them, and whose chief executive said recently “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation” (where “innovation” is code-speak for “opportunities for me to turn a profit”).

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don’t, they’re doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town.

Nearly two years ago, Oracle went to court and accused Google’s Android team of infringing patents and copyrights related to the Java programming language. After about 900 motions and filings, and legal fees that are undoubtedly mind-boggling, the trial will finally get started this week. Android has faced many legal challenges, but this is easily one of the most significant, and one of the only ones targeting Google itself rather than the company’s hardware partners.

With Oracle demanding royalties from Android revenue, a ruling in its favor could raise the price consumers have to pay for Android devices. An Oracle win could also force Google to design around the patents asserted by Oracle, perhaps limiting Android’s functionality.

Jury selection will take place Monday, and the trial proper is scheduled to begin later in the day Monday, or Tuesday. Let’s take a look at what’s happened so far, and what’s next in this crucial trial for Android, the world’s largest-selling smartphone operating system.

Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood’s ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile’s case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications.

Charges against Hotfile that alleged direct copyright infringement were thrown out last year by a federal court judge. The remaining charges allege that the company is liable for inducing its users to infringe copyright. The answer to that question will hinge on whether the courts find that Hotfile has substantial non-infringing uses.

A study commissioned by the MPAA, which was based on a sampling of Hotfile downloads, seemingly showed that a majority of the site’s content was infringing. Duke University law professor James Boyle, expert witness for the defense, issued a rebuttal demonstrating the flaws in the methodology used by the Hollywood study.

Professor Boyle’s statement, which cites the results of a more comprehensive statistical analysis of the content stored on Hotfile, was included in a sealed filing that was leaked this week by TorrentFreak. Boyle’s research highlighted an extensive volume of non-infringing Hotfile usage that had been overlooked by the plaintiff’s study.

Perry’s remarks focused on the shift from peer-to-peer file-sharing to file-sharing websites. “Cyberlockers” such as Megaupload are one example. But Perry also pointed to MovieBerry as an example of an infringing site that looks legitimate to many consumers and has even convinced legitimate companies to buy advertising.

Perry conceded that “cyberlocker” sites were not inherently illegal, but he said sites like Megaupload have crossed the line because their business model was supported by “not much else other than copyright infringement.” He claimed that the top five cyberlockers get tens of billions of page views per year, generating millions of dollars in profits.

Perry emphasized the large number of jobs supported by Hollywood movies. Hollywood employs more than just actors and directors, he said. “We have drivers, florists, people moving things around.” Yet thanks to online file-sharing, he claimed, Hollywood is making fewer movies, and spending less on each one. That means fewer jobs.

Perry stressed the need for additional legislation to crack down on “rogue sites.” He argued that the new domain seizure powers created by the 2008 Pro-IP Act were insufficient to deal with the problem. And he denounced the OPEN Act, sometimes touted as a SOPA alternative, as “unworkable.”

At the Brooklyn event, Perry’s comments were followed by a rebuttal from Brooklyn Law School Professor Jason Mazzone, who pointed out that Perry’s remarks had completely ignored limitations on copyright such as fair use. According to an account by Mazzone’s colleague Derek Bambauer, Perry responded by saying that Paramount “wants to give fair use ‘a wide berth,’ and that their core concerns are about full downloads of their films, not uses of clips and such.” But he conceded that SOPA had not made such allowances for fair use.

At the University of Virginia, Perry’s remarks were followed by a rebuttal by Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, who argued that Hollywood’s failing profits had less to do with Internet file-sharing than with the industry’s failure to produce good movies and come up with innovative business models.

The start-up has also brought Richard “Chip” Lutton, a 10-year Apple Inc. veteran who managed the company’s patent portfolio, on board as vice president and general counsel.

In Honeywell’s suit against Nest, first filed in a U.S. district court in Minnesota on Feb. 6, Honeywell, maker of the iconic round thermostat, identified seven patents it believes Nest Labs infringes on with its Nest Learning Thermostat, a digital thermostat that came to market late last year. (You can read more about Honeywell’s complaint here.)

And now Nest has fired back.

“Nest does not use the Honeywell patents; but even if the patents covered what Honeywell alleges, they are hopelessly invalid. They are retreads — already invented by others years before …” the response reads.

Nest goes on to point out that specific patents — around remotely controlling temperature set-point marks, displaying temperature set points on an LCD inside a rotating ring, and presenting a user of an HVAC controller with “complete grammatical sentences” — are either indistinguishable from earlier Honeywell patents or aren’t worthy of a patent.

So! That’s quite a story, if it’s all true — and it appears that the government has quite a case, as Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins have all quickly settled. Apple and the others appear to be in for the long haul, so we’ll see how they respond in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’re very curious to see how this all affects the Apple / Amazon relationship, as the two biggest players in digital media appear to be a lot nastier to each other behind the scenes than we previously knew.

Technology giant Apple and major publishers are being sued by the US Department of Justice over pricing of e-books.

The US accuses Apple and book publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin of colluding on prices of books on the iPad.

This lawsuit is over the agency model where publishers set the prices of e-books, rather than sellers.

The lawsuit comes a day after Apple surpassed $600bn (£379bn) in value.

The increase affirmed its position as the world’s most valuable firm.

“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers,” according to papers filed in New York’s Sourthern District court on Wednesday morning.

We have previously discussed the ways we deal with spam on Twitter. Our engineers continue to combat spammers’ efforts to circumvent our safeguards, and today we’re adding another weapon to our arsenal: the law. One challenge in battling spam are bad actors who build tools designed to distribute spam on Twitter (and the web) by making it easier for other spammers to engage in this annoying and potentially malicious activity. This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.

While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam. For example, earlier this week, our engineers launched new anti-spam measures within Twitter to more aggressively suspend a new type of @mention spam. Additionally, we now use our link shortener (t.co) to analyze whether a tweeted link leads to malware or malicious content. This helps us prevent users from visiting malicious links and helps us shut down hundreds of thousands of abusive accounts. You can help out, too, by reporting and blocking spammers you encounter on Twitter.

We are committed to fighting spam on all fronts, by continuing to grow our anti-spam team and using every tool at our disposal to shut down spammers. Today marks an important step forward.

Does the government have a responsibility to protect innocent third parties from collateral damage when it seizes their property in the course of prosecuting alleged copyright infringement? That is the question a federal district court will consider next week in the latest skirmish in the legal battle between the U.S. government and Megaupload.

When the government shut down Megaupload three months ago, it made it impossible for innocent third parties, like our client Kyle Goodwin, to access their data stored on that site. Others—like service provider Carpathia—have also voiced legitimate complaints about their property getting caught up in the government’s dragnet. But the government has tried to wash its hands of all responsibility, insisting it doesn’t control the property anymore and that the court has no authority to intervene. On April 13, a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia will hear arguments concerning what should happen with Mr. Goodwin’s data and Carpathia’s servers. Ahead of that hearing, here are some specifics on who will be there and what they will argue:

A federal judge has ruled that Colorado ran afoul of the US Constitution when it passed legislation forcing out-of-state retailers to report their customers’ purchases to the state’s tax authority.

Two decades ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot require mail-order retailers to collect sales tax unless the retailer has a physical presence in the state. Under the commerce clause of the US Constitution, only Congress can regulate interstate commerce, and the Supreme Court ruled that forcing retailers to collect out-of-state sales taxes would create too much of a burden on interstate commerce. The courts left the door open for Congress to establish an interstate sales tax collection system. But while Congress has discussed the possibility, no legislation has been enacted so far.

State governments, frustrated to see a growing share of their taxpayers’ spending going to online retailers they can’t tax, have tried a variety of strategies to get the retailers—or their customers—to pay up. A number of states have passed laws classifying online retailers’ affiliate programs as a physical presence in their states. Amazon.com has responded by shutting down its affiliate programs in those states.

In 2010, the Colorado legislature tried a different approach. It passed legislation requiring large retailers that do not collect sales tax to report the purchases of Colorado residents to state tax authorities. Like most states, Colorado has a widely-ignored use tax, which consumers are supposed to pay on products they buy from out-of-state retailers. The state hoped that having their purchases reported to the state would scare consumers into paying the use taxes they owed.

But the Direct Marketing Association, which represents many businesses that would be subject to the law, sued in federal court. It argued that the reporting requirements were an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce, and that under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, only Congress had the power to compel out-of-state retailers to submit tax paperwork across state lines.

On Friday (as first reported by the Denver Post), Judge Robert Blackburn agreed. He found that the reporting requirement impermissibly discriminated against out-of-state retailers. While Colorado’s law isn’t targeted explicitly at non-Colorado businesses, it is targeted at businesses that do not collect Colorado sales tax, which amounts to the same thing.

Last month we reported on allegations that the plaintiff in several copyright trolling cases was represented by an attorney who was not licensed to practice law in Florida. The judge, Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida, put the cases on hold and ordered the attorney, Terik Hashmi, to explain himself in February.

In his reply, Hashmi conceded that he had been practicing law without a license and asked Hinkle for permission to substitute another attorney in his place. Hinkle allowed the substitution, but on Monday he ruled that it wasn’t sufficient to save the lawsuits. He dismissed all 27 copyright lawsuits Hashmi had initiated. The plaintiffs, mostly producers of pornographic films, will need to start over with new attorneys if they want to continue the lawsuits.

Judge Hinkle’s order dismissing the cases was scathing. He noted that Hashmi had previously signed an affidavit with the Florida bar in which he “swore that he understood that holding himself out as authorized to practice law in Florida would constitute contempt of the Florida Supreme Court and a third-degree felony.”

Hinkle also said that Hashmi “swore that he understood that it would constitute the unlicensed practice of law to hold himself out as an attorney or as able to render legal advice or services; to offer legal services to others; or to collect fees for legal services. The assertion that Mr. Hashmi thought he could properly undertake to represent these plaintiffs in these cases…is plainly unfounded.”

Between them, the 27 lawsuits targeted several thousand Internet users, all of whom will get a reprieve as a result of Hashmi’s unlicensed practice of law.

The 10 patents Facebook is asserting against Yahoo in a counterclaim accusing Yahoo of ripping off Facebook-owned technology shows that Facebook’s recent push to acquire more patents is moving along at breakneck speed. In at least one case, and perhaps several, the patents asserted today were acquired after Yahoo provoked Facebook by accusing the company of patent infringement.

Facebook is also claiming that it has “implied” licenses to the very patents Yahoo is using to sue Facebook, perhaps because of a technology partnership that the companies had before they started suing each other.

Yahoo’s March 12 lawsuit, claiming that “Facebook’s entire social network model … is based on Yahoo!’s patented social networking technology,” took advantage of a Facebook weakness—a shortage of patents relative to its competitors. But Facebook has been ramping up its patent acquiring spree, both by filing for new patents and buying them from other companies.

Two of the 10 patents asserted by Facebook do originate with the company, including one obtained by none other than founder Mark Zuckerberg. But one of the patents asserted by Facebook was acquired on March 30, 2012, two others were acquired on Feb. 1, 2012, and two were acquired on Dec. 8, 2011. That leaves three other patents asserted by Facebook—and all three are still recorded by the US Patent and Trademark Office as being owned by New York University. In all likelihood, Facebook has acquired those patents from NYU so recently that it hasn’t yet recorded the transfer with the patent office.

What could I say? I guess we have another hire whether he’s qualified or not. Here’s the bottom line: My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” by knowledge of their sexual orientation, illnesses, religion, political affiliations, and other factors that expose us to anti-discrimination legislation. We can’t even claim that the employee improperly disclosed these matters to us, as we are the ones initiating the investigation of their private doings
Worse, I cannot manage these people once they’re hired. I would be diffident about censuring them or passing them over for advancement for fear of incurring a lawsuit that would be a distraction to our business and damaging to our reputation as fair employers.
Therefore, please consider this my formal resignation. The COO does not tell me how to write software, so I will not tell her how to set HR standards, but I would ask that you review this policy and ask whether it is truly in the company’s interest to indiscriminately dig through a candidates’ private lives. Either that, or we should move to a jurisdiction where we have zero exposure to legal consequences for discrimination.

With Oracle’s patent and copyright infringement lawsuit against Google scheduled to go to trial on April 16, the judge overseeing the case recently ordered the two companies to hold one final round of settlement talks. But those talks have failed and the trial will proceed as scheduled, it was revealed today.

“Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, the parties have reached an irreconcilable impasse in their settlement discussions,” Judge Paul Grewal of US District Court for the Northern California wrote Monday. “No further conferences shall be convened. The parties should instead direct their entire attention to the preparation of their trial presentations.”

Oracle alleges that Google violated Java patents and copyrights in developing the Android operating system. In addition to the settlement talks, Oracle and Google were asked to propose methods of streamlining the trial, which is expected to last eight weeks. Google proposed a damages payment to Oracle of $2.8 million, to be paid in the event Oracle proves patent infringement, but Oracle rejected the offer as being too low, Reuters reported.

The numbers provided by Google in its damages proposal suggest that Google earned $550 million in revenue from Android between 2008 and 2011, according to a story in the Guardian. That estimate has not been confirmed, however. Oracle wants hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Weird Al Yankovic, through his company Ear Booker Enterprises, is suing Sony Music Entertainment for $5 million.



The complaint alleges that Sony Music took improper and duplicate recoupments, which resulted in royalty under payments. It also alleges the major is paying Yankovic a straight royalty for download sales instead of the 50% of revenues that a licensing deal calls for. Additionally, it says Sony Music hasn’t shared any money it received from lawsuits settlements from such cites as Napster, Kazaa and Grokster.



The lawsuit states that Sony Music received an equity stake in YouTube in exchange for providing the site with the company’s content. At the time, Sony Music was given an equity stake; Yankovic “White & Nerdy” video was among the most popular content on the site. The suit says, “a portion of Sony’s equity share in YouTube is directly apportionable and allocable to “White & Nerdy,” as well as other content created by Yankovic.

iPhone 4 owners who meet certain criteria and didn’t accept a free bumper from Apple after experiencing antenna problems are now being invited to apply for a $15 settlement. The claim website went up early Thursday morning following February’s settlement of several class-action lawsuits, which offers instructions for those who want that extra $15 in their pockets. The deadline for filing a claim is August 28, 2012.

Most iPhone users remember 2010’s iPhone 4 “antennagate.” It was discovered that holding the device a certain way reduced cellular signal levels, potentially down to nothing, which caused an uproar in the Apple community and beyond. (This was despite the fact that numerous other phones—including those made by other manufacturers—appeared to also exhibit this behavior.) Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs even responded to an e-mail from us inquiring about the antenna by saying, “App phones have sensitive areas. Just avoid holding it in this way.”

Eventually, Apple held a press conference to address the issue and offered free iPhone bumpers to iPhone 4 owners. This didn’t stop a number of lawsuits from moving forward, however, resulting in February’s settlement.

In order to qualify for the $15 payout, users must affirm that they’ve experienced reception issues with their iPhone 4, were unable to return it without incurring any costs, were unwilling to use a free bumper, and completed “certain troubleshooting steps.” The settlement is only available to iPhone 4 owners in the US, and if the $15 payment still doesn’t sound appealing, class members are still able to ask for a free bumper via Apple Care or an Apple Retail store.

The City of Boston has agreed to pay Simon Glik $170,000 in damages and legal fees to settle a civil rights lawsuit. Glik was arrested in 2007 on Boston Common for using his cell phone to record the arrest of another man. Police then arrested Glik, too, and charged him under the strict Massachusetts wiretapping statute. They eventually dropped the charges, but with the help of the Massachusetts ACLU, Glik filed a civil lawsuit against the city for false arrest.

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that Glik had a “clearly established” First Amendment right to record the actions of public officials on a public sidewalk. Boston finally admitted it had made a mistake earlier this year, and Boston taxpayers will now be paying for the screw-up.

TiVo today accused Motorola and Time Warner Cable, a Motorola Customer, of violating patents covering the company’s digital video recorder technology.

TiVo’s accusation comes in the form of counterclaims filed in response to a lawsuit Motorola launched against TiVo a year ago in the Eastern District of Texas. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing , TiVo said it has accused Motorola and Time Warner of infringing patents numbered 6,233,389 ; 7,529,465 ; and 6,792,195 .

The patents cover TiVo’s “multimedia time warping system,” TiVo’s “time shifting multimedia content streams,” and its method and apparatus for allowing rewind, pause, and fast forward capabilities in streaming video.

Digital video recorders have been a popular technology for patent infringement lawsuits, and TiVo in particular has aggressively defended its patents. After a series of legal setbacks, Dish Network agreed to pay TiVo $500 million by way of a settlement. Motorola’s suit against TiVo accused TiVo of violating Motorola DVR patents, and TiVo and Microsoft recently settled litigation related to the same type of technology.

High-level executives at Google and Oracle were ordered to hold one last round of settlement talks, with the trial over Google’s alleged use of Java technology in Android set to begin April 16.

The suit began in August 2010 when Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement over use of the Java programming language in development of Android. Settlement talks have been ordered multiple times, but so far no deal has been made. On Friday, Judge Paul Grewal of US District Court in Northern California ordered Android chief Andy Rubin and Oracle Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz to hold “a further settlement conference” no later than April 9.

The last-ditch effort to avoid a trial seems unlikely to succeed. The trial date of April 16 was recently confirmed, after Oracle narrowed the scope of its claims against Google.

Oracle initially accused Google of violating seven patents, but has since dropped most of them. This is due to the US Patent and Trademark Office ruling the patents described technology that was not patentable. Two patents assigned to the Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems remain: #6,061,520, which covers “an improvement over conventional systems for initializing static arrays by reducing the amount of code executed by the virtual machine to statically initialize an array,” and #RE38,104, which covers a type of compiler and interpreter.

The ‘520 claim has been confirmed as patentable, but the ‘104 claim is on shaky ground, having been “preliminarily rejected.” Several other claims were rejected outright by the patent office. At the moment, the trial is slated to examine the two remaining patents and Oracle’s copyright claims.

Oracle and Google filed new briefs on the copyright issues Friday. Oracle jumped on a Google statement regarding use of Java APIs, saying “Google finally admits what everyone has known all along: ‘the Android specifications for the 37 API packages at issue have substantially the same selection, arrangement and structure of API elements as the J2SE specifications.’”

Google, however, argued that APIs cannot be copyrighted, saying “languages and APIs provide the tools for expression, but their vocabularies are not copyrightable expression.”

Android, of course, has faced legal threats on multiple fronts. Most major hardware vendors selling Android phones have agreed to pay Microsoft licensing fees to avoid patent lawsuits. Apple has sued multiple Android vendors, and offered licensing deals to some of them. While hardware vendors have been the primary target, Oracle seeks financial damages from Google itself.

The Supreme Court today unanimously invalidated a broad patent covering a method for determining the proper dose of a drug used to treat autoimmune disorders, saving the medical profession from a new breed of patents on medical diagnostic tests.

The patent focused on the process of administering a class of drugs, called thiopurines, that are used to treat autoimmune disorders. Doctors adjust the dosage by measuring the concentration of a chemical called a metabolite in the patient’s blood. The patent didn’t cover the drugs themselves, nor any particular method for measuring metabolite levels—these were already widely used in the medical profession. Instead, the patent covered the concept that particular metabolite levels “indicate a need” to raise or lower drug dosage.

A firm called Prometheus Labs sold a thiopurine testing product, but in 2004 the Mayo Clinic decided to stop using Prometheus’s product and begin selling its own competing thiopurine testing product. Prometheus sued, arguing that if a doctor used Mayo’s test and then thought about the correlations described in Prometheus’s patent, the doctor—and, indirectly, Mayo—would be infringing the Prometheus patent. Prometheus had its patent upheld by an appeals court.

The prospect of allowing patents on what amounts to human thought prompted a broad range of interest groups, including the ACLU, the Cato Institute (disclosure: I contributed to Cato’s brief in the case), and the American Medical Association, to file briefs urging the Supreme Court to invalidate the patent. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did so in a unanimous vote.

The courts have long held that laws of nature—like the correlation between thiopurine metabolites and appropriate drug dosages—are not, by themselves, eligible for patent protection. But the application of a law of nature to a particular problem may be patentable. Prometheus argued that the steps specified by the patent—administering the drug and measuring the level of the metabolites—were sufficient to avoid violating the rule against patenting laws of nature.

But the high court wasn’t convinced. In the court’s opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the patent simply instructs doctors to “engage in well-understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by scientists who work in the field.”

“To transform an unpatentable law of nature into a patent-eligible application of such a law, one must do more than simply state the law of nature while adding the words ‘apply it,’” he wrote.

With file sharing site Hotfile facing an attempt by film studios to shut it down, Google has argued in an amicus brief that Hotfile should be eligible for the same type of legal protection that allowed the Google-owned YouTube to fend off the famous copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom.

Google’s brief (via TorrentFreak) says the company is not taking a position on what the final outcome of the Hotfile case should be, but states that the movie studios’ interpretation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) would significantly weaken the DMCA’s safe harbor protections that have protected many of the Internet’s most popular and vital websites.

“A wide variety of online services, including Amazon.com, eBay, and YouTube… have all been held protected by the DMCA against potentially crippling infringement claims,” Google wrote in a filing in US District Court in Southern Florida. “Other mainstays of the modern Internet, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, likewise rely on the DMCA safe harbors in their everyday operations. Without the protections afforded by the safe harbors, those services might have been forced to fundamentally alter their operations or might never have launched in the first place.”

Film studios Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, and Warner Bros. argued that Hotfile induced users to commit copyright infringement, disqualifying the site from safe harbor protections. The studios cited the MGM vs. Grokster Supreme Court decision from 2005, saying the case “holds that a defendant who operates a service with the ‘object’ that it be used to infringe is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.” Inducement is also an important issue in the case regarding Megaupload, as we’ve explained in previous coverage.

Google objected to this argument, saying that the DMCA should protect defendants against claims of both direct infringement and “secondary infringement” such as inducement. “As in Viacom, the same facts that demonstrate a defendant’s entitlement to the safe harbors may help establish that it is not an inducer,” Google wrote. “But it would be a significant mistake to hold, as plaintiffs urge, that a finding of secondary liability [such as inducement] in and of itself disqualifies a service provider from the safe harbor.”

The Google brief seems somewhat contradictory, arguing in one part that the safe harbor question should be treated separately from the inducement question, and in another that a service provider who qualifies for DMCA safe harbor “is protected against damages liability for all forms of copyright infringement,” including inducement.

Lawyers representing a Nigerian fishing community are taking the oil firm Shell to court in London over alleged unpaid compensation for recent oil spills.

Shell has accepted responsibility for the spillage of about 4,000 barrels in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta.

But Bodo community representatives say they are having to resort to legal action after negotiations broke down.

The head of Shell Nigeria said that with different lawyers representing claimants it was difficult to resolve.

Nigeria is one of the world’s major oil producers, but the oil-producing Niger Delta region remains one of the country’s poorest and least developed regions.

The Ogoni people have long complained about the environmental damage to their communities, but they say they have mostly been ignored.

Facebook has acquired 750 patents from IBM, in a deal that has not yet been announced publicly by the companies, Bloomberg Businessweek reported today.

The move will help rectify a problem exposed by Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook—namely, that the company doesn’t have enough patents to deter lawsuits from rivals. While acquiring patents has no direct impact on the validity of Yahoo’s claim, a bigger and stronger portfolio would increase Facebook’s options now and in the long run, as we noted in a story last week . For example, a well-placed countersuit could lead to a mutually beneficial licensing agreement. Additionally, adding to Facebook’s patent stash opens up the possibility of launching suits against other rivals.

A search of the US patent database shows Facebook owning just 21 US patents—although Businessweek said the company actually has 56 patents and 503 pending applications. Still, Facebook’s patent portfolio is dwarfed by Yahoo’s, which has more than 1,000. IBM has plenty to spare, having been granted 6,180 US patents in 2011 alone , the 19th consecutive year IBM topped the list of patent recipients.

Yahoo claimed Facebook infringes ten patents covering social networking, privacy, messaging, advertising, and website customization. We don’t know exactly which patents Facebook is getting from IBM. Businessweek said only that the patents “cover various technologies such as software and networking,” a description that likely applies to many thousands of IBM patents. IBM also sold 200 patents to Google in January , and another 1,000 to Google last year.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed unsympathetic to the claims of a protester who said his free speech rights had been violated when Secret Service agents protecting Vice President Dick Cheney arrested him after he made critical remarks about the Bush administration’s war policies.

Even some of the court’s more liberal justices said Secret Service agents and others charged with protecting the nation’s leaders must have breathing room in assessing potential threats. The question that appeared to divide the justices was whether all law enforcement officials should be protected from lawsuits alleging that arrests were made in retaliation for speech protected by the First Amendment.

A lawyer for the agents, Sean R. Gallagher, characterized the core question in the case this way: “The issue before the court today is whether Secret Service agents who are prepared to take a bullet for the vice president must also be prepared to take a retaliatory arrest lawsuit, even when they have probable cause to make an arrest.”

David A. Lane, a lawyer for the protester, Steven Howards, said that “there is no reason to put some different rule down on the Secret Service” when First Amendment rights are involved.

Justice Antonin Scalia responded, “Well, we’ve lost a couple of presidents.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he was sensitive to what he called “the problem of protecting people in public life” but was concerned about the possibility that police officers offended by political messages would make arrests for trivial offenses like jaywalking.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that a ruling limited to the Secret Service could lead to a different problem. “A person should put on his car a bumper sticker that says, ‘I hate the police,’ ” he said. “And every time they are pulled over, they will have certainly a plausible case.”

Such a driver could argue, he said, that an arrest was motivated by retaliation. “It’s not because I was going 60 miles an hour,” the driver would say. “It’s because of my bumper sticker.”

The case arose from an encounter in 2006 at a mall in Beaver Creek, Colo. A Secret Service agent said he had heard Mr. Howards say into a cellphone that he planned to ask Mr. Cheney “how many kids he’s killed today.” Mr. Howards later approached Mr. Cheney and said the administration’s “policies in Iraq are disgusting.”

Until January, Megaupload was a major customer of Carpathia Hosting. Now Megaupload is facing a federal indictment, and its servers have become a major burden for Carpathia.

Carpathia is the proud owners of 1,103 servers with approximately 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on them. The government seized Megaupload’s assets, so the firm can’t pay its bills and Carpathia has cancelled Megaupload’s service contract. But Carpathia hasn’t been able to reuse the servers for other customers because doing so might interfere with the Megaupload court case or invite lawsuits from Megaupload customers who lose data as a result.

On Tuesday, the hosting firm filed a request with a Virginia federal court asking for relief from the financial burden of continuing to maintain the servers. The company estimates it pays $9,000 per day for rack space, power, and connectivity. In addition, the servers themselves are worth $1.25 million. Since Megaupload is no longer paying for service, Carpathia would like to re-allocate the servers for the use of other customers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has intervened in the case on behalf of Megaupload’s users, some of whom used the service for legitimate file transfers. EFF has argued that these innocent users have a right to this data, and has threatened to sue to vindicate these users’ rights.

Carpathia calls 25 petabytes an “historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data,” and argues that if that data needs to be preserved, someone else—the government, Megaupload, or an interested party such as the MPAA or EFF—should bear the costs of preserving the data. The problem is that so far no one has come up with a way to satisfy all interested parties. Megaupload is willing to take custody of the data, but the government and the MPAA have both objected, perhaps fearing that Megaupload would destroy evidence. The other parties—the government, EFF, and MPAA—have all said they’re not willing to take custody of the servers.

Carpathia suggests several possible resolutions. One would be to allow Megaupload to put its site back online for a limited period of time so that legitimate users could download their data; after that, the data would be deleted and Carpathia would be free to do what it wanted with its servers. Another option would be for the courts to order a third party—most likely the government or Megaupload—to take custody of (and pay Carpathia for) the servers. A third would be for the parties to pay Carpathia for the costs of continuing to maintain the servers. Carpathia wants the government to pick one of these options, because right now the situation is costing it thousands of dollars a day.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a federal law requiring DNA collection for criminal arrests occurring under federal authority (US v. Mitchell). In denying the petition for review, the Supreme Court allows the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling to stand in which the court dismissed arguments that the federal law is unconstitutional. The non-profit organization DNASaves, founded by parents of murder victim Katie Sepich, filed an amicus brief in Mitchell in support of the U.S. Justice Department’s defense of the law and was gratified to learn that the lower court ruling will stand.

We’re happy to report that the patent system is getting a much need jolt of sanity, in the form of a clear Supreme Court ruling affirming a basic, but sometimes forgotten, principle: laws of nature, and obvious methods of working with them, are not patentable.

Earlier this month, we bemoaned the Federal Circuit’s propensity to further confuse the standard for unpatentable subject matter in the wake of In re Bilski . Specifically, we wrote that a recent ruling in Ultramercial v. Hulu “could impermissibly (and dangerously) expand the scope of patentable subject matter.”

So, we were pleasantly surprised yesterday by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mayo v. Prometheus, where it unanimously struck down a patent covering a medical diagnostic test. You may remember that that three categories of “inventions” are not patentable: laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. In Mayo’s case, its patent covered a method of giving a drug to a patient, testing the metabolite levels in the patient, and tweaking the dosage accordingly. Correctly, the Supreme Court held the patent invalid because it took laws of nature and merely included “well-understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by researchers in [the] field.”

Hopefully, the Federal Circuit will heed the message that, as the Supreme Court put it, “simply appending conventional steps, specified at a high level of generality, to laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas cannot make those laws, phenomena, and ideas patentable.” This is particularly important because, as we’ve said before, merely tying an idea that is otherwise abstract – in the case of Ultramercial, for example, displaying an ad before a viewer can access content – to the Internet, without more, is not enough to make the idea patentable.

As more and more of our everyday lives go online, using the Internet as a medium should not be enough to support a patent monopoly on an otherwise abstract idea.

Throughout its opinion, the Supreme Court reiterated its “concern that patent law not inhibit further discovery by improperly tying up the future uses of the laws of nature.” We couldn’t agree more. In light of Mayo, it seems likely the Supreme Court will send some high-profile cases – like Ultramercial and Myriad (the breast cancer gene case ) – back to the Federal Circuit for reconsideration. If so, the Federal Circuit should reverse its rulings that allowed dangerous patents representing nothing more than abstract ideas and laws of nature to exist, since these are the very types of patents that ensure the patent system fails to do its core job: protect innovation in America.

When it comes to the government’s ability to search your electronic devices at the border, we’ve always maintained that the border is not an “anything goes” zone, and that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow the government to search whatever it wants for any (or no) reason at all. And this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to rehear a case that gave the government carte blanche to search through electronic devices at the border.

John Steele is one of the nation’s most prolific copyright trolls. Last year, an Illinois federal judge wrote that Steele had “abused the litigation system in more than one way.” Apparently undeterred by the thumping he received in Illinois federal courts, Steele has joined a new firm and shifted his litigation campaign to Florida state courts.

State courts don’t have jurisdiction over copyright law, but this fact didn’t deter Steele and his compatriots, who tried to use an obscure provision of Florida law called a “pure bill of discovery” to obtain subscriber information without actually filing a copyright lawsuit. As Princeton copyright scholar Bart Huffman explained last year, this ancient provision of Florida law wasn’t intended to be used this way, and the firm was forced to make a number of creative arguments to justify its request.

Florida Judge Marc Schumacher wasn’t impressed by the firm’s legal gymnastics. The phrase “copyright troll” appears in the second paragraph of Judge Schumacher’s decision, and things go downhill for Steele from there.

Google has filed a brief at a federal court in Florida defending the file-hosting site Hotfile in its case against the MPAA. The search giant accuses the movie companies of misleading the court and argues that Hotfile is protected under the DMCA’s safe harbor. Indirectly, Google is also refuting claims being made by the US government in the criminal case against Megaupload.

In the United States, most online services are spared the burden of filtering their users’ content. As long as they promptly take down files on request and follow other requirements laid out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, online service providers don’t need to proactively monitor the files they host for infringing content.

But German law may be different. TorrentFreak reports that a court in Hamburg ruled last week that the popular file-hosting site RapidShare must proactively filter files uploaded by its users. While the full ruling has not been released, a statement says RapidShare is required to block its users from uploading a list of 4,000 files known to be infringing.

The case was brought by a group of German booksellers, who celebrated the ruling. “The judgment confirms that Rapidshare must take effective measures against the use of illegal content on its service,” said a German bookseller’s association. But a Rapidshare spokesman criticized the celebration as premature, pointing out that the decision’s implications won’t be clear until the written opinion is released.

RapidShare hasn’t said if it will appeal the ruling, but if it does the law may be on the file-sharing site’s side. Last month, an EU court ruled that the pervasive monitoring required to make such a filter effective would run afoul of Europe’s strict privacy laws.

In its surprising patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook, Yahoo is taking advantage of several factors to pin its former partner into a position of weakness.

For one, Yahoo has existed longer than Facebook, giving it more time to obtain patents covering Web technologies, even if it didn’t put all those patented innovations to good use itself. Second, Yahoo’s lawsuit—filed Monday—was strategically timed to occur after Facebook’s filing for an initial public offering, but before the IPO actually takes place. To satisfy investors, Facebook may be forced into a costly settlement rather than risk a long, legal battle that could harm the company’s perceived market valuation.

Third, Facebook appears to have a tiny patent portfolio compared to Yahoo’s. Facebook’s patents or lack thereof have no direct impact on the merits of Yahoo’s lawsuit, but a bigger and stronger patent portfolio could allow Facebook to file a countersuit against Yahoo, putting it into a position of strength in settlement negotiations.

If the lawsuit heads to a trial, Facebook can argue that Yahoo’s patents are invalid, too broad, or simply aren’t infringed upon by Facebook’s technology. But arguing against every claim in each Yahoo patent will be a difficult task. The ten patents combined lay claim to 285 methods and technologies, and invalidating one portion of a patent doesn’t necessarily invalidate the rest.

“Separate and apart from the question of the individual strength of any of these patents, there are still ten patents and a few hundred claims here,” IP attorney Patrick Patras of Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP in Chicago told Ars. “It would be very difficult for an accused infringer to succeed against all of that.”

An increasingly desperate LightSquared today accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating its constitutional property rights by rejecting its application to build a 4G network on spectrum adjacent to that used by GPS devices, and demanded that the FCC either reverse its decision or give LightSquared a new chunk of spectrum.

The bold claims follow the FCC’s decision last month to withdraw LightSquared’s conditional approval to use spectrum allocated for satellite transmissions for cell towers instead. In a long response to the FCC that was made public late Friday, LightSquared claimed the FCC’s action constitutes a “taking of LightSquared’s property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

The argument seems unlikely to sway the FCC. The agency has authority over how spectrum is allocated. Moreover, the FCC made it clear to LightSquared in its conditional approval that a final waiver would not be granted unless concerns about GPS interference were eliminated.

Brazilian prosecutors say they will bring criminal charges against 17 executives from the US oil company Chevron and drilling contractor Transocean after a new leak of crude.

The executives have been barred from leaving the country until the investigation concludes.

Chevron halted production in Brazil after the new oil leak was found on the seabed off Brazil earlier this week.

The seepage is near a well where there was a major oil spill last November.

A Chevron spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the latest legal moves because it had not been notified of the decision.

The oil company is already facing a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit over November’s spill.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would release same-day audio recordings of the arguments over the constitutionality of the health care overhaul law. The arguments will be heard over three days starting on March 26.

The court’s recent practice has been to release audio recordings of arguments at the end of the week. It plans to alter that practice for the health care case, a press release from the court said, “because of the extraordinary public interest” in the arguments.

The court said the recordings would be available on its Web site around 2:00 p.m. for arguments held in the morning on each of the three days, and around 4:00 p.m for an argument to be held in the afternoon on March 28.

The press release did not address television coverage but suggested by implication that the court would not allow it.

Between 2000 and 2010, the court released same-day audio recordings 21 times, starting with two in the case that came to be known as Bush v. Gore and ending with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In other cases, recordings were not released until the end of the term.

In September 2010, the court announced a new system, saying that same-day release of recordings would be discontinued and that recordings of the week’s arguments could be released on Fridays. The court ordinarily hears arguments on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The new system took the court out of the business of making judgments about which arguments are newsworthy, a practice that raised First Amendment concerns. The significance of the arguments over the health care apparently overcame those concerns.

The court has been recording arguments since 1955. Many are available at the National Archives and on the Oyez Project, a multimedia archive from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law.

In a bid to save its 4G network after being rejected by the Federal Communications Commission, LightSquared has hired lawyer Theodore Olson, who helped President George W. Bush take office by winning the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, and former Department of Labor Solicitor Eugene Scalia.

Olson told Politico that it’s too early to say what LightSquared’s legal strategy will be. LightSquared gained conditional FCC approval for a new 4G-LTE network using both satellites and cell towers in January 2011, but the FCC pulled the plug on the network last month after extensive testing showed it would interfere with GPS devices. In the wake of that decision, LightSquared has reportedly explored potential lawsuits against the FCC and GPS industry members.

“What happened to LightSquared is ‘an egregious example’ of the government encouraging a company to invest an enormous amount of money to meet a national objective and then ‘pulling the rug out from under them capriciously and precipitously,’” Olson said, according to Politico. “’On the face of things, it looks to me like the government has acted arbitrarily after inducing the expenditure of an enormous number of resources.’”

LightSquared argues that the GPS industry had years in which it could have modified devices to avoid interference from spectrum licensed to LightSquared, but failed to do so. The GPS industry argued in turn that modifying all existing and future devices would be impractical. Swayed by results of government testing, the FCC concluded that the GPS system was not ready to handle interference from LightSquared’s proposed network, and withdrew its conditional approval.

A popular pub and music venue called The Hobbit has been threatened with legal action by US movie lawyers.

The Southampton pub has been accused of copyright infringement by lawyers representing the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) in California.

The company owns the worldwide rights to several brands associated with author JRR Tolkien, including The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.

Landlady Stella Mary Roberts said: “I can’t fight Hollywood.”

The pub in Portswood, which is popular with students, has traded with the name for more than 20 years.

It features characters from Tolkien’s stories on its signs, has “Frodo” and “Gandalf” cocktails on the menu, and the face of Lord of the Rings film star Elijah Wood on its loyalty card.

A letter from SZC asked it to remove all references to the characters.

The company asserts it has “exclusive worldwide rights to motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights in certain literary works of JRR Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit”.

The US justice department has rejected a Texas voter ID law, amid concerns the measures could disenfranchise Hispanic voters.

Hispanics registered to vote in Texas are twice as likely as other groups to lack required photo ID, justice officials said.

The states of South Carolina and Wisconsin are also facing legal battles over their voter ID laws.

Texas officials say their law, approved in May 2011, aims to deter voter fraud.

In a statement, Texas governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry said the justice department had “no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane”.

Mr Perry says the move is another example of “the Obama administration’s continuing and pervasive federal overreach”.

A federal court in Washington will now decide if Texas, as well as South Carolina, can enforce their new voter photo ID measures.

Meanwhile, a judge in the state of Wisconsin on Monday issued an injunction against that state’s stricter photo ID law for voters.

U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may have another thing coming. The New York District Attorney’s Office has begun sending subpoenas to Twitter seeking data on protesters arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests last year.

Late last week, activist Jeffrey Rae received one such email, which included a copy of a subpoena from the D.A. requesting data from his Twitter account. The letter, which has been published on Scribd , demands that Twitter hand over a list of data, including all public tweets from Rae’s account between September 15 and October 31, 2011.

Other data sought by the D.A.’s office includes name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, the types of devices used by Rae to access Twitter and any IP addresses from which he connected.

Rae was one of several hundred people who were arrested on October 1 for attempting to march across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. Like others, he was charged with blocking traffic, improper use of a roadway and failure to obey orders.

Yahoo has filed an intellectual property lawsuit against Facebook.

Yahoo claims the social network has infringed 10 of its patents including systems and methods for advertising on the web. Facebook denies the allegation.

The move comes ahead of Facebook’s planned flotation later this year.

Patent litigation has become common between the smartphone makers, but this marks a new front in the battles between the tech giants.

A statement from Yahoo suggested the web portal believed it has a strong case.

“Yahoo’s patents relate to cutting edge innovations in online products, including in messaging, news feed generation, social commenting, advertising display, preventing click fraud and privacy controls,” its suit said.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology.

The social network signalled that it believed that Yahoo had not tried hard to settle the matter without involving the courts. It described Yahoo’s action as “puzzling”.

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation,” it added.

Yahoo has charged onto the already crowded patent litigation battlefield, charging Facebook with infringing ten of its patents:

To build a successful website, users need to have easy access to many functions and tasks such as messaging and privacy options. The website owner needs revenue through functions such as advertising. All of these functions involve Yahoo!’s innovations. Without Yahoo!’s achievements, websites such as Facebook would not enjoy repeat visitors or substantial advertising revenue.

Yahoo claims Facebook infringes patents related to online advertising, privacy, web customization, social networking, and messaging.

Yahoo’s complaint does not allege that Facebook directly copied Yahoo’s products.

And now the Minnewaska school district in Minnesota stands accused of coercing a 12-year-old girl into giving up her Facebook and e-mail passwords, so that a school could spy with their little eye.

CNN reports that she was also twice punished for things she wrote on Facebook.

A lawsuit on behalf of the girl —brought in conjunction with the ACLU—declares that her First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

The girl—referred to in the court papers as R.S.—apparently felt that her hall monitor was mean to her and therefore described her as “mean” on her Facebook profile. She claims that no school equipment or property were used to make her postings.

It is unclear how a screenshot of her postings got back to the school principal, but it seems they did. Even one in which she wanted to know—using strong language—who had betrayed her.

It is alleged that the password-demanding incident occurred when the parents of another student objected to a Facebook post in which sex was discussed.

What seems even more pulsating is that the court papers state that she was called to a meeting at which a school counselor and the deputy sheriff were present.

It was at this meeting that she was allegedly “interrogated” and surrendered the passwords to her Facebook and e-mail accounts.

And, no, her mother had allegedly not consented to the search.

Shantelle Hicks, a 15-year-old from Gallup, N.M., claims she was first forced to leave the Wingate Elementary School and then publicly outed as being pregnant in front of all students and employees, KOB-TV reports.

Wingate Elementary is a public boarding school for Native American children from kindergarten through 8th grade.

Now, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Hicks has filed suit against the school, claiming they violated her constitutional rights. According to the complaint, school officials kicked Hicks out of school after learning of her pregnancy, but readmitted her four days later when the ACLU of New Mexico informed the school that it’s illegal to deny a student access to education for being pregnant.

But two weeks after her readmission, a school counselor and the director of the middle school forced the teen to stand before the middle school assembly and announced her condition — allegedly before anyone but her sister knew.

“It was so embarrassing to have all the other kids staring at me as I walked into the gymnasium,” said Hicks, according to KOB. “I didn’t want the whole school to know I was pregnant because it’s not their business, and it wasn’t right for my teachers to single me out.”

According to the suit, school officials informed Hicks that she would be a “bad example” to other students, and requested she attend another school, a Washington Post local report states.

“It is outrageous that educators would subject a young woman in their care to such cruelty,” ACLU of New Mexico cooperating attorney Barry Klopfer said, according to the Indian Country Today Community Network.

The girl’s mother, Vicky Hicks, says her daughter’s public humiliation was wrong.

“[Students] shouldn’t be treated differently because they’re pregnant,” Hicks told KOAT-TV.

The lawsuit was filed on March 6th and seeks punitive damages and declaratory relief for violation of constitutional rights to equal protection and of the Title IX prohibition against sex and pregnancy discrimination in education.

Human rights lawyers are to sue Foreign Secretary William Hague over the alleged use of intelligence in assisting US drone attacks in Pakistan.

The case is being raised at the High Court in London on behalf of Noor Khan, whose father was killed in a US strike.

Lawyers from Leigh Day and Co say civilian intelligence officers who give information to the US may be liable as “secondary parties to murder”.

The Foreign Office said it did not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

The lawyers, which include some from the international charity Reprieve, want to establish what official UK policy or guidance is with regard to assisting the US in such cases.

Leigh Day and Co says Mr Khan’s father Malik Daud was part of a council of elders holding a meeting in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, when a drone missile hit the group.

The firm said it had “credible, unchallenged” evidence Mr Hague oversaw a policy of passing British intelligence to US forces planning attacks against militants.

Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.

The judgment – part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven – found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.

Judge Roger Hunt’s judgment confirms that an online forum is not liable for its users’ posts, even if it was not protected by the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown provisions. The decision also clarifies that a common practice on the Internet – excerpting a few sentences and linking to interesting articles elsewhere – is a fair use , not an infringement of copyright.

Tradehill, the major Bitcoin exchange that shut down last month citing regulatory problems, has filed a lawsuit against the payment startup Dwolla. Tradehill charges that Dwolla cheated it out of more than $160,000. According the lawsuit, the loss of funds forced most of Tradehill’s employees to work without pay beginning in September 2011 and was a major factor in the exchange’s collapse last month.

Tradehill claims the two firms had a falling-out over “chargebacks.” A customer in a traditional bank can dispute a charge he believes to be fraudulent; the bank will typically reverse the transaction and begin an investigation to determine the truth of the accusations. Evidently, some of Tradehill’s users transferred funds to Tradehill from their banks using Dwolla, purchased Bitcoins, and then disputed the original Dwolla withdrawals with their banks. Dwolla responded by deducting the funds from Tradehill’s account.

The problem, according to Tradehill, is that Dwolla had advertised its service as having “no chargebacks.” Tradehill says Dwolla’s website had stated that transactions were “as good as cash,” and that representatives from the e-commerce site repeatedly confirmed that transactions made through Dwolla were final.

Tradehill claims it tried to address the issue with the startup when money started disappearing from Tradehill’s account. But Dwolla allegedly stonewalled, forcing Tradehill to go public with its concerns. The Bitcoin exchange says Dwolla reacted by “scrubbing” its website of references to its “no chargebacks” policy, and allegedly altered its terms of service to specify that customers were responsible for chargebacks.

This put Tradehill in a bind because while Dwolla only claimed to offer irreversible transactions, Bitcoin transactions really are irreversible. So when Dwolla began reversing previously confirmed transactions, the company had no way to recover the lost funds. Tradehill says it lost $94,000 due to chargebacks, and another $70,000 when Dwolla blocked Tradehill from withdrawing its remaining funds by accusing the Bitcoin exchange of fraud.

Obviously, there may be another side to this story. Dwolla declined to comment to us, but in a statement to American Banker , it confirmed that the dispute was over chargebacks. Dwolla denounced Tradehill’s lawsuit as consisting of “specious allegations made by those who have a self-serving interest in seeking publicity.”

The dispute illustrates what’s likely to be a persistent difficulty for firms that attempt to straddle the line between Bitcoin and the traditional banking system. Traditional banks are built on a web of trust. They do business with other institutions with established reputations. Because they know who they’re dealing with, they can expect to use after-the-fact investigations and legal penalties as a backstop against fraud. This creates headaches for merchants who need to deal with fraud complaints, but it makes the system safe and convenient for consumers.

Bitcoin, in contrast, is built on the premise that no one has to trust anyone else. Transactions are irreversible, and a Bitcoin user is out of luck if his money is taken fraudulently. That’s a headache for consumers, but it has an important upside: Bitcoin transactions really are final.

That works fine as long as everyone is dealing in Bitcoins. But it creates friction when people want to transfer funds from traditional banks to Bitcoin. Depositing dollars into a Bitcoin exchange is invariably a reversible transaction, while withdrawing Bitcoins from an exchange is not. If the deposit is later disputed, the exchange will wind up holding the bag.

To be fair, this problem isn’t unique to Bitcoin. If Tradehill is telling the truth about Dwolla’s abrupt change in its “no chargebacks” policy, Dwolla didn’t fully think through the implications of offering cheap, irreversible payments. Merchants understandably hate chargebacks, so the idea of a chargeback-free financial system is intuitively appealing. But the flip side of no chargebacks is that there are no remedies for defrauded consumers. And, ultimately, consumers are the ones spending all the money, so businesses have little choice but to cater to their whims.

A judge has temporarily blocked the state’s new voter identification law, weeks before the state’s April 3 presidential primary. The law, passed last year by a Republican-controlled Legislature, requires voters to present photo identification at polling places. Judge David Flanagan of Dane County issued an injunction on Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by the N.A.A.C.P., which argued the law disenfranchises voters, many of them minorities, who do not have acceptable identification. Thirty states require voters to show some form of identification, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

Lawyers for Newt Gingrich and his presidential campaign have asked a federal judge in Chicago to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the candidate for using “Eye of the Tiger” to pump up crowds at campaign stops and political conferences dating back to 2009, according to court documents filed on Monday.

The lawsuit was filed in January on behalf of Rude Music Inc., an Illinois-based record label owned by Frank Sullivan, who co-wrote the rock song as a member of the band Survivor. As The Times’s James C. McKinley Jr. reported earlier , Mr. Sullivan has asked a judge to issue an injunction to stop Mr. Gingrich from using the song and is seeking unspecified damages.

Responding to the lawsuit, Mr. Gingrich’s lawyers said he denied “any and all wrongdoing.”

The song had been played in a mix of background music, but its inclusion in the mix constituted fair use under federal law and is protected by the First Amendment, the lawyers said.

Mr. Gingrich’s lawyers also said the Chicago court did not have jurisdiction over the complaints against Mr. Gingrich and Newt 2012 Inc., his campaign operation, because Mr. Gingrich lives in Virginia and his campaign headquarters are in Georgia.

Reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Brian A. Rosenblatt, the attorney who filed Mr. Gingrich’s response, said he could not comment on the pending litigation.

Annette McGarry, the Chicago lawyer representing Rude Music and Mr. Sullivan, was not available for comment on Monday evening.

While it is not uncommon for political candidates and songwriters to skirmish over songs, the campaigns usually drop the songs from their playlists when threatened with a lawsuit.

From a legal standpoint, whether playing a song at a political gathering might amount to copyright infringement is still an open question.

The lawsuit said Mr. Gingrich began using the song – which was released in 1982 as a theme song for “Rocky III” – in 2009 at the Conservative Political Action Conference and other political events. Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, also used the song during recent campaign appearances in Pennsylvania and Iowa, the complaint said.

A pair of cryptic court filings surfaced in Virginia this week that suggest Google (NSDQ: GOOG ) is in a fight with the federal government over Megaupload, the file-sharing site that was shut down in a dramatic raid in January.

It appears that the FBI likely demanded that Google turn over Kim Dotcom’s email account and any related information, and then forbid the company to notify him of the investigation. In the past, companies—notably Twitter —have been aggressive in challenging gag orders so that they can notify customers about government searches. Such notification gives subscribers the option of challenging the searches in court.

The Mannheim Regional Court in Germany has thrown out two lawsuits between Apple and Samsung, adding to the pile of discarded lawsuits between the two companies.

One of the two suits dismissed on Friday was filed by Apple against Samsung asserting its slide-to-unlock patents in the iPhone, while the other dismissed lawsuit is the third Samsung 3G patent lawsuit in a row to be dismissed. Unsurprisingly, Samsung was displeased with the decision, telling the BBC that it planned to appeal. “We will continue to assert our intellectual property rights and defend against Apple’s claims to ensure our continued ability to provide innovative mobile products to consumers,” the company said.

Apple did not publicly comment on the decisions but pointed the BBC to a previous statement wherein the company accused Samsung of “blatantly copying ” its hardware and UI designs used in the iPhone and iPad. And, as noted by FOSS Patents , this is just the beginning—only four of at least 14 Mannheim court cases between Apple and Samsung have been ruled on so far. (There are at least six left from Apple against Samsung alone.) Is anyone getting patent suit vertigo yet?

A group representing plaintiffs suing BP over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill has reached a settlement with the company, a US judge says.

The trial, due to begin on Monday, will now be delayed - for a second time - as a result of the deal, Judge Carl Barbier said .

The settlement will “likely result in a realignment of the parties”, he said.

The rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, killing 11 workers and leaking four million barrels of oil.