“A feud involving the man who sang ‘Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer’ could wind up in court, just in time for Christmas. Elmo Shropshire was sued for breach of contract Monday by a company that claims he interfered in a $1 million-plus deal to sell musical trucks, bobblehead dolls, snow globes and cookie jars featuring characters from an animated show based on the novelty song.” (AP/San Mateo County Times, Nov. 28).
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Canada: Staples sued over customers’ unauthorized copying
“Access Copyright has launched a $10 million lawsuit against Staples/The Business Depot for unauthorized copying by store customers. The copyright collective claims this is the largest lawsuit ever launched over copyright infringement of published works in Canada.” (Michael Geist, Nov. 15)(via Fagstein).
Annals of creative patent lawyering
Highly placed attorney with intellectual-property specialists Fish & Richardson accumulates his own portfolio of patents, quits the firm, begins suing Fish & Richardson clients, things get messy fast (Patent Troll Tracker, Oct. 21). Patent Troll Tracker (h/t Ambrogi) looks likely to become part of our regular blog rounds.
Apple iPhone: environmentalists pile on
Everyone else is getting publicity by filing suits over the iPhone, so they may as well too: “Environmentalists have threatened to sue Apple if it does not make its iPhone a “greener” product or tell consumers of the toxins allegedly used in the device’s manufacture. The Center for Environmental Health (CEH), a campaign group based in Oakland, California, said that it would launch legal action in 60 days unless Apple took action.” (Rhys Blakely, Apple faces legal threat over ‘toxic’ iPhone”, Times Online (U.K.), Oct. 17; InfoWorld; ArsTechnica). The CEH is invoking California’s ultra-liberal Prop 65 toxics-warning law, on which see posts here, here, here, etc.
Apple sued for dropping iPhone price
Queens, N.Y. resident Dongmei Li has sued the tech giant, along with AT&T and Steve Jobs, over the $200 slash in the price of the much-ballyhooed cellphone less than two months after its launch. Among her many claims are that Apple unfairly deprived her of the chance to sell her early-bought iPhone at a profit, and that the $100 store credit Apple offered early buyers was inferior to the full refund they could have obtained if they decided they didn’t like the product right away. (Kasper Jade, “Apple, Jobs, AT&T sued over iPhone price cut, rebates”, AppleInsider, Sept. 28; Tom Krazit, “One More Thing”, CNet, Sept. 28; more comments at TechMeme; Katherine Mangu-Ward, “When Bad PR Happens to Good Economics”, Reason, Sept. 14). At the Apple Insider Forums, commenter Ken Laws quotes a passage describing another part of the suit:
“The lawsuit goes on to accuse Apple, Jobs and AT&T of forcing customers into 2-year service agreements with AT&T and imposing hefty $175 termination fees.”
I’ll never forget that terrifying night. I was just sitting at home, minding my own business, when Steve Jobs and a platoon of AT&T thugs burst through my front door…. Hovering helicopters and troops with vicious, snarling dogs kept the damned in line as we waited, huddled in fear, knowing our only choices were to sign the two year contract or be put up against the back wall of the Apple Store and shot.
I survived that night. But I know a lot of people who didn’t. I see their faces whenever I get a call on my iPhone, because I screwed up my contacts list and all the portraits are wrong.
Earlier iPhone suits: Jul. 30, Sept. 25, and (trademark claim): Jan. 10.
Jack Thompson: I’m being imaginarily assassinated
Anti-videogame Miami attorney and longtime Overlawyered favorite Jack Thompson claims that players in the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV are given instructions to kill a certain lawyer in his office and that the lawyer utters the line “Guns don’t kill people. Video games do,” which means it must be a parody of Thompson himself. He’s fired off a demand that the release be halted. (GamePolitics.com, Sept. 18; Geoffrey Rapp, PrawfsBlawg, Sept. 20). For Thompson’s legal threats last year against the publisher of Mortal Kombat because users can employ the game’s build-a-fighter mode to create characters that might resemble him, see Oct. 30, 2006. Plus: Thompson responds in comments.
Web disputes of the future two weeks
A popular blog meme is the Mingle blog rating (e.g. Bainbridge, Opinio Juris). You won’t see it here: movie ratings are trademarked by the Motion Picture Association of America, and they come down like a hammer on those who use the trademarks, and this blog-meme not only uses the letter rating, but the actual MPAA symbol. Unfortunately, US trademark law forces the MPAA to take a heavy-handed approach, because of the alternative: forty years ago, they did not seek trademark protection for their new “X” rating and as a result, the rating became a generic symbol for hard-core pornography (and infantilized the commercial moviegoing public: because now most theaters and brick-and-mortar video stores refuse to offer anything rated harder than “R”, we no longer get such movies, unlike the early 1970s when major studios would make X-rated movies with stars like Marlon Brando or Dustin Hoffman).
(And how well does the blog meme work? Well, the gizmo shares the MPAA’s left-leaning sensibilities: we got bumped to a “PG” because of multiple uses of the word “gun.”)
Nastygram over renting out DVDs
Travis Corcoran gets an “angry and curt” call from an intellectual property lawyer over this practice, and reacts with some ferocity (TJIC, May 17).
Update: New trial for Julie Amero
The Connecticut substitute teacher was tried and convicted after her computer, probably owing to a malware bug, displayed smutty websites in students’ presence (Jan. 20, Feb. 15, Mar. 14). The original trial, notes Glenn Reynolds (Jun. 7), “seemed like a grotesque miscarriage of justice”; prosecutors did not oppose a defense motion for a new trial. (Nate Anderson, “Substitute teacher spared sentencing for porn pop-ups, gets new trial”, Ars Technica, Jun. 7).
Use our product or we’ll sue
Two manufacturers of digital rights management (DRM) systems, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com, “have issued cease and desist letters against Apple, Microsoft Real and Adobe for not including their technological protection measures in products like Windows, iPod and Flash Player.” (TechnoLlama, May 12; Louisville Music News, May 16, whose headline we have borrowed). Explains Podcasting News (May 12):
The companies are using an unusual interpretation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to make their case. The DMCA, signed into law by President Clinton in 1998, makes prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners. According to the firms, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the DMCA.
Freedom to Tinker (May 15) says that if you believe the companies’ legal claim is sound, “I have a bridge to sell you — and let me assure you that you’re legally compelled to buy it.”