Who knew less than 140 characters could potentially cost more than $50,000, in the form of a defamation lawsuit?
That’s something Amanda Bonnen is discovering the hard way. (Read more at Chicago Now)
Related News:

Landlord sues tenant after tweet about moldy apartment (ars technica)
Landlord claims libel over ‘mold’ Tweet (Chicago Breaking News Center)
Chicago tenant’s Twitter slam draws suit (Chicago Sun-Times)

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{Image by Twitter}

After being sued by EFF, company relents on claims of copyright, DMCA violations

A wiki operator who was browbeaten by Apple’s legal team into removing posts about circumventing the company’s music-playback software tells me he is relieved that the iTunes proprietor has changed its tune and he’ll be able to restore the disputed pages.
Apple backed off only under legal pressure of its own in the form of a lawsuit filed against it by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
From an EFF press release:

In November 2008, Apple sent a series of legal threats …

Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are among a dozen companies sued over dashboard mounts for navigation devices in a rare case of a Chinese company seeking to enforce patent rights in a U.S. court.
Changzhou Asian Endergonic Electronic Technology Co., based in Changzhou, China, claims the retailers are infringing its patent on a design for the dashboard mounts by selling products made by a competitor. It wants cash and a court order to prevent further use of the design. The patent was issued in March.
The complaint, filed July …

Twitter may file suit against blogs, other Web sites that published hacked information

If Twitter decides to sue Web sites and bloggers that published information pilfered from its systems by hackers, the company could be diving into murky and largely untested legal waters.
Biz Stone, co-founder of the micro-blogging site, confirmed in a blog post yesterday that a hacker gained access to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee and with that was able to lift private company documents. At that point, the hacker offered the information to various blogs …

There’s been an interesting and ongoing saga occurring between two companies: Facebook (Facebook), the world’s largest social network, and Power.com, a social media aggregator that has significant traction overseas and launched its U.S. version late last year. Facebook threw a wrench into Power.com’s gears when it filed a lawsuit claiming that it used Facebook data without authorization.
The result? A heated debate over data ownership that ended with Power.com removing access to Facebook. But the battle over user data isn’t over, as Power.com has just filed a lawsuit in California …

The Recording Industry Association of America on Monday demanded a federal judge order Harvard University’s Charles Nesson to remove from the internet “unauthorized and illegal recordings” of pretrial hearings and depositions in a file-sharing lawsuit headed to trial.
“Enough is enough. For the past five months, this court has repeatedly warned defense counsel regarding his insistence on engaging unauthorized and illegal recordings of counsel and proceedings in this case,” RIAA attorney Daniel Cloherty wrote (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Massachusetts. Cloherty urged the court to sanction Nesson, the …

A Racine man must give a deer head he took from a roadside carcass to wildlife officials, a state appeals court ruled today.

According to the ruling from the 2nd District Court of Appeals, John Longo found a dead deer on the side of the road near his home in February 2008. He loaded it into his truck, took it home and ate it. He had the deer’s head mounted and hung it in his home, court documents show.
Longo, now 69, didn’t immediately return a message left at a residential …

New Guidelines Result from Attorney General’s Investigation of Exorbitant Hannah Montana Ticket Prices

Chicago – Attorney General Lisa Madigan today reached an agreement with a Ticketmaster subsidiary, TicketsNow, to curb deceptive tactics used by TicketsNow. The agreement is the result of Madigan’s investigation into TicketsNow’s marketing practices after receiving dozens of complaints about the high prices ticket brokers charged for Hannah Montana and Bruce Springsteen concerts and other popular events. Madigan’s investigation revealed that TicketsNow’s brokers were in the practice of creating customized Web sites where they resold tickets they …

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.
No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential …

A mother is being charged with neglecting her obese teenage son, raising issues about whether the government has the right to intervene in one’s family life.
Born and raised in South Carolina, Alexander Draper grew up to reach a dangerous 555 pounds by the age of 14. That’s when law enforcement stepped in.
“The first and foremost concern is Alexander’s health,” Lt. Shea Smith told CBS News.
Alexander’s mother, Jerri Gray, was charged with unlawful neglect of a child for allowing him to become obese.
“There have been opportunities to get Alexander some …

If you wanted to know what guidelines the FBI sets for itself internally to govern the surveillance of US citizens, you’d be out of luck. The document that the FBI looks to for guidance in protecting your civil liberties from its own snooping is itself a secret, so the EFF has filed suit to have it released.

The EFF’s recent amicus filing in the case of Warshak v. United States got quite a bit of mileage out of a nice quote from the Department of Justice’s surveillance manual, which contains …

A former spy picks forbidden fruit and sells health in the produce aisle.

A tall, brawny Irish American walks into your office, puts a crystal goblet on the desk, and pours out a serving of a deep-purple nectar.
“This stuff used to be illegal,” he says in a gravelly voice. “We’re the guys who got the law changed. Twice the antioxidants of blueberries, four times the vitamin C of orange juice, as much potassium as bananas … Try it.”
Something like grape juice but heavier, not as sweet; tart but not as …

ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you’re violating copyright law by “publicly performing” it without a license. At least that’s the import of a brief [2.5mb PDF] it filed in ASCAP’s court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T.
This will doubtless come as a shock to the millions of Americans who have legitimately purchased musical ringtones, contributing millions to the music industry’s bottom line. Are we each liable for statutory …

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each — a total of $1.9 million — for 24 songs.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said.
Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at the fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.
She plans to appeal, he said.
Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association …

Executives from the nation’s largest phone companies went to Capitol Hill Tuesday to defend themselves against allegations that they’ve been fixing prices on text messaging.
Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, saying their companies have not been involved in a conspiracy to hike text messaging rates. And they argued that competition is alive and well in the wireless market.
The hearing was called in response to a letter sent in September from Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) to the four …

JK Rowling and her publisher are being sued for £500million for allegedly copying Harry Potter from an earlier children’s book, also by an English writer.
Adrian Jacobs’s book Willy The Wizard – also about a child discovering he has magical powers – was published in 1987, ten years before the first in the Harry Potter series and three years before Miss Rowling says she came up with her idea.
He allegedly sent the manuscript to Christopher Little, the literary agent at Bloomsbury Publishing who went on to represent Miss Rowling, but …

Recording industry lawyers dodged a bullet today after the judge in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset retrial threatened to throw out the complete testimony of an important expert witness. Not disclosing new information to opposing counsel makes federal judges very, very grumpy.

A remarkable scene unfolded Tuesday at the Jammie Thomas-Rasset retrial in Minneapolis, as Judge Michael Davis threatened to toss out the morning’s entire testimony by RIAA computer science expert Doug Jacobson. The judge warned recording industry lawyers that he was “contemplating striking the doctor’s testimony based on your behavior in …

AFTER an investigation that took more than a year, Microsoft has filed its first lawsuit over click fraud, where people manipulate clicks on a Web advertisement.
Microsoft filed the civil complaint on Monday in United States District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia, along with several corporation names they were believed to have used, and several unnamed parties.
Microsoft is seeking at least $750,000 in damages. That might seem a small amount for a company that had sales of $13.7 billion last …

Troubled automaker moves closer to deal with Italian company, but Indiana pension funds appeal to Supreme Court in last attempt to stay sale.

A group of Indiana pension funds has made a last-minute effort to block Chrysler’s deal with Italian automaker Fiat.
An appeals court Friday upheld Chrysler LLC’s plan to exit bankruptcy.
The ruling backs the formation of a new company that will be owned jointly by the U.S. government, an autoworker’s union retiree fund and Fiat.
The deal will go through on Monday afternoon unless the Supreme Court intervenes, Chrysler attorney …

A California court has ruled against Starbucks “baristas” in their class action suit to recover tips they had claimed were wrongfully shared with Starbucks “shift supervisors”. This overturns a previous judgment requiring Starbucks to repay the baristas $85 million in allegedly unpaid tips.
The baristas in the case had argued that a provision of California’s labor laws prohibited the shift supervisors from getting piece of the tip box pie because the law stated:

“No employer or agent shall collect, take, or receive any gratuity or a part thereof that is paid, …