Congress basically repudiated support for a meaningful public domain with the 1976 Copyright Act and subsequent amendments, by making the term of Copyright last beyond a century ("70 years plus some life in being" or out to 120 years if copyright was owned by a corporation). The original Copyright Act of 1790 set a term of 14 years with the option to renew for an additional 14 years, ensuring the rapid development of a valuable public domain. Since 1977 additions to the public domain have slowed to a crawl. We will have to wait more than a century to see new contributions to it from contemporary sources. By then many out-of-print works long abandoned by their copyright owners because re-publication is uneconomical, will have disappeared altogether. If Congress were to set more reasonable limits on Copyright, projects like Google Books wouldn't have to proceed under the unsure cover of the Fair Use doctrine.

"Once you figure out that the phone is designed by someone with no sense of logic, it's a lot easier."

Quote of the decade.

Lawyer I worked for in the early 90's demonstrated this to me. He'd been a detective with the NYPD and had this formula to validate SSN's. With a little work he'd figured out how to predict as well. No, I wasn't able to follow his math. This guy was one of those proverbial self taught geniuses who was able to do that kind of stuff in his head.

Cue the scary orchestra music.

Really good news.

Requesting attorneys fees and costs from your opponent on a motion is pretty much standard practice. What will be interesting to see is if the defendants (Daimler/Chrysler) later move for sanctions under the local "frivolous claim" rule in their jurisdiction. These kinds of rules exist in the Federal courts (Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) and most states. It looks like Michigan has a similar rule in effect (MCR 2.625(A)(2), MCL 600.2591(2)). Nice thing about these kinds of provisions is that their sanctions can be directed against the attorneys as well as the parties. Sorry for not including links to the citations, but for obvious reasons I don't want to be responsible for the "slashdotting" of a particular Federal or state court website. Just Google it.