The multi-million-dollar legal battle over a pair of missing pants has headed back to court, shocking many in the dry-cleaning and legal communities. A three-judge appellate court panel has agreed to hear an appeal of the case next month, more than a year after a judge ruled against the plaintiff, former judge Roy Pearson.
The validity of open source software licenses won a major court victory when a federal judge ruled this week that copyright law allows programmers to control the modification of their software even though it’s free. The ruling makes legal sense, said copyright attorney Ross Dannenberg.
The video containing this statistic, “An anthropological introduction to YouTube”, is a presentation given by Dr. Michael Wesch, an anthropologist from Kansas State University, at the Library of Congress on June 23, 2008.
The heirs of the Knights Templar have launched a legal battle in Spain to force the Pope to restore the reputation of the disgraced order which was accused of heresy and dissolved seven centuries ago.
The lawsuit filed in trial court by paralegal Angela Robinson, which seeks $55,000 for wrongful termination and other causes, accuses Texas plaintiffs giant Richard Laminack of encouraging Robinson to perform sex acts on a witness who was not “doing well” during a deposition.
British High Court judge Anthony Mann ruled that Andrew Ainsworth had violated Lucasfilm’s U.S. copyright by selling replica stormtrooper uniforms through his Web site. But Mann refused to enforce a $20 million judgment Lucasfilm won against Ainsworth in a California court in 2006.
Two of the lawyers on the team defending Pyster against the Apple lawsuit successfully represented Burst.com in its patent lawsuit against Apple, which was recently settled out of court for a $10 million licensing deal. Pyster is accused of violating Apple’s license, trademarks, and copyrights by selling its own computers with Mac OS X pre-installed.
Hasbro Inc, the company that owns the North American rights to the word game, last week sued the creators of Facebook’s popular Scrabulous program. Separately, Hasbro asked Facebook to block the game, something the site resisted despite risks of losing immunity protection from copyright lawsuits.
Perhaps shaken by the negative publicity generated from the legal battle between BlackBerry developer Research in Motion and a patent-trolling firm called NTP, the USPTO seems to have gotten religion on patent quality.