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The Courts

Submission + - Army Sergeant in Tennessee Sues RIAA

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "A 33-year old Army Sergeant stationed at Fort Campbell, in Tennessee, has counterclaimed against the record company palintiffs, in Warner v. Paternoster. His counterclaim seeks forfeiture of the plaintiffs' copyrights, and other relief, against Warner, BMG, Arista, Virgin,, and UMG, based on his claim (pdf) that they had colluded together in violation of the antitrust laws, had deliberately padded their court filing with embarrassing material in order to "shame" the defendant into paying a settlement for actions he did not commit, and "conspired together on other activities ...including: (1) bringing, without investigation sufficient to establish that the allegations ... have evidentiary support, lawsuits against persons who are not specifically known to have infringed copyrights, including persons who are deceased, disabled or who lack knowledge of how to use computers or download files from the internet; (2) making false and unsupported allegations ... by making the unwarranted and technologically erroneous assumption that an Internet Protocol address is a unique identifier of a computer or an individual; (3) using a corporation as their agent to make extortionate threats to take criminal action and to defame defendants' names and credit, in order to force defendants to pay sums which have no relation to plaintiffs' actual damages, if any, and by delivering releases to settling defendants (few of whom are represented by counsel) which are fraudulent in that they do not constitute true releases of all claims by putative plaintiffs, thereby misleading settling defendants into erroneously believing that they cannot be sued again; (4) jointly agreeing upon exorbitant settlement amounts which are nonnegotiable and are arbitrarily increased at set intervals thereby depriving the defendants in these actions of any reasonable opportunity to negotiate a settlement; (5) commencing ex parte "John Doe" lawsuits which they have no intention of pursuing, but by means of which they are able to communicate with District Judges, Magistrate Judges, and other judicial officials on a daily basis, without providing defendants with notice or opportunity to be heard, in violation of attorneys' ethical obligations as officers of the Courts; (6) invading the privacy of these "John Doe" defendants by then serving subpoenas on Internet Service Providers without notice to the putative defendants; (7)withdrawing such actions upon being challenged and thereby preventing defendants from obtaining relief for having to defend them; and (8) engaging in other unconscionable conduct.....[They] have commenced tens of thousands of actions in the District Courts of the United States in the past five years, the overwhelming majority of which have resulted either in default judgments or extortionate settlements far in excess of any actual damages incurred by Counter-Defendants... Such actions represent an attempt by Counter-Defendants to secure for themselves rights far exceeding those provided by copyright laws....""
Communications

Submission + - T-Mobile contract terms held unconscionable (ca.gov)

Submitted by
Stephen Lindholm
Stephen Lindholm writes: "Good news for T-Mobile customers. In a class action brought against T-Mobile, this past week, the plaintiffs have successfully argued that T-Mobile cannot prevent its customers from filing a class action against it. The plaintiffs are suing over non-prorated early termination fees and the selling of SIM-locked handsets.

T-Mobile, as many other cell phone companies do these days, had written into its contract with customers that any disputes between T-Mobile and the customers had to be resolved by arbitration. Requiring customers to go to arbitration means that customers cannot sue, and more importantly it means that customers cannot file class actions. The result, if the contractual terms requiring arbitration were valid, would be that the most abusive cell phone company practices could not be limited by customers bringing lawsuits.

However, in the suit Gatton et al. v. T-Mobile USA, Inc., the plaintiffs convinced the trial court that the contractual provision requiring arbitration was unconscionable and therefore not enforceable. On June 22, 2007, the California appeals court affirmed the trial court's ruling. The class action is going forward.

Presumably, this means that customers of other cell phone companies will be able to sue their own cell phone companies as well. The particular grievances against T-Mobile in this class action are the imposition of non-prorated early termination fees and the selling of SIM-locked handsets. Both of these are common to other cellular carriers, although it's not clear from the appellate opinion whether T-Mobile is doing something extra-shady with the SIM-locking. (The appellate opinion states, "T-Mobile requires equipment vendors to alter the handsets they sell to T-Mobile by locking them with SIM locks and setting the SIM unlock code based on a secret algorithm provided by T-Mobile.") So if this suit is unltimately successful in California, it may not take long before non-prorated early termination fees and SIM-locked handsets die a long-awaited death."
Patents

USPTO Examiner Rejected 1-Click Claims As "Obvious" 195

Posted by kdawson from the well-duh dept.
theodp writes "Faced with a duly unimpressed USPTO examiner who rejected its new 1-Click patent claims as 'obvious' and 'old and well known,' Amazon has taken the unusual step of requesting an Oral Appeal to plead its case. And in what might be interpreted by some as an old-fashioned stalling tactic, the e-tailer has also canceled and refiled its 1-Click claims in a continuation application. As it touted the novelty of 1-Click to Congress last spring, Amazon kept the examiner's rejection under its hat, insisting that 'still no [1-Click] prior art has surfaced.' The Judiciary Committee hearing this testimony included Rick Boucher (VA) and Howard Berman (CA), both recipients of campaign contributions from a PAC funded by 1-Click inventor Jeff Bezos, other Amazon execs, and their families."
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Defends "Expert", says "everyone

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Arguing that "everyone in his field proceeds the same way that he did", and that "there is no other way to do what he did" (pdf), the RIAA opposes Ms. Lindor's motion to exclude the testimony of Dr. Doug Jacobson at trial based on Dr. Jacobson's deposition testimony in which he admitted that neither his work, nor that of MediaSentry, upon which he relied, had any of the ordinary indicia of "reliability" required of expert testimony in federal court."
Programming

Submission + - People Don't Hate to Make Desktop Apps.. Do They?

Submitted by Annie Peterson
Annie Peterson writes: Paul Graham has been maknig the argument that desktop development is dead — That's his premise for declaring Microsoft dead as well, and he claims that no one out there likes to develop for the desktop anymore. But that's not true, or is it? Desktop development is easier, faster, more productive, and infitinetly more enjoyable — right? The question is, since Web Apps were originally built on desktop applications themselves, have the tables flipped? Or is it just wishful thinking?
Novell

Submission + - openSUSE Hobbled by Microsoft Patents

Submitted by
kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: "openSUSE 10.2 no longer enables ClearType (which improves the appearance of fonts). The reason given on the openSUSE mailing list for not enabling it is:

Note that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library.
As reported on and discussed here and here, this matter may be connected to the Microsoft-Novell deal. If so, Novell should have received a license for the Microsoft patents, assuming the deal covered all relevant patents. Does the license therefore extend only to SUSE, but not openSUSE?"

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