Apparently most of the cast of the iconic sitcom Happy Days aren't particularly happy with CBS and Paramount right now, as they've filed a lawsuit against the two companies, saying those companies haven't been paying the royalties they owe the cast from home video sales and merchandise sales (there's still Happy Days merch on the market?!?). Notably missing from the lawsuit are stars Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, but much of the rest of the main cast is there. Amazingly, the lawsuit was apparently triggered by a Happy Days cast member seeing a Happy Days slot machine, and wondering why no royalties were being paid. After contacting Paramount to find out how much money was owed from merch, and being told the answer was (of course), none, they moved on to a lawsuit. What struck me as most interesting is that, typically in these types of lawsuits, the studios being sued claim that the actors are wrong. In this case, however, CBS actually put out a statement saying: "We agree that funds are owed to the actors and have been working with them for quite some time to resolve the issue." Of course, that should probably make you wonder if actors from other shows also need to file a lawsuit just to get what's owed to them...

Mimi & Eunice summarize the latest Huffington Post drama.

Before the don't touch my junk guy, there was Michael Roberts, the pilot who, back in October, refused both the naked backscatter scan and the intrusive groping pat-down, was not allowed to fly his plane, and was put on leave by his company (ExpressJet). He's now suing the TSA over the search process:

"People are messed up because they touch your crotch," pilot Michael Roberts said. "They touch your bottom, your breasts, I mean, everything.

That said, I haven't seen the actual legal filing, so I'm not sure if he has much of an actual case here. It will be interesting to follow either way.

A few weeks ago, I walked out my front door to see a phone book dropped on the front step. I honestly couldn't remember the last time I'd seen one. But I picked it up and walked it straight over to the paper recycling bin, where I deposited it. That's what an awful lot of people do these days. Apparently, the city of Seattle passed a law recently creating a "do-not-deliver" list for residents, that would bar phone book providers from delivering the books to their homes. However, the Yellow Pages Association has now sued the city, claiming that this law is a First Amendment violation:

The complaint... asserts that the ordinance enacted last month violates the First Amendment, which prohibits government from licensing or exercising advance approval of the press, from directing publishers what to publish and to whom they may communicate, and from assessing fees for the privilege of publishing. The suit also claims that the Seattle ordinance unlawfully interferes with interstate commerce and violates the privacy rights of Seattle residents...

The Seattle ordinance unfairly singles out the Yellow Pages industry with regulations and fees that are not imposed on other media, including discriminatory license fees for the right to publish and unprecedented "advance recovery fees" that previously have been limited to toxic or hard-to-recycle materials. The ordinance also mandates that publishers turn over consumers' private information to the City of Seattle and imposes obligatory cover language dictated by the city government.

Now, I'm a pretty big First Amendment supporter, but I'm not sure how a bar on dropping a phone book on someone's property -- at their request -- is a free speech violation. Perhaps I'm missing something? In the meantime, the group actually says that it's not against letting people opt-out, and is actually creating a website to let people do just that. It just doesn't like this particular law.

Reader technofear was the first of a few of you to send over variations on the story that Lily Allen is allegedly suing Apple to force the company to help her figure out who hacked into her laptop. At least that's about all I can figure out from the various press reports. I've read about a dozen at this point, and all of them are incredibly vague. There's a hacked laptop. There's a request to Apple, which was refused, and then there was a "lawsuit." While I'm not sure how UK law works on this topic, if it were in the US, it sounds more like a situation where she's seeking someone's IP address, and is filing for a subpoena (or something like it) to compel Apple to reveal certain information which may identify who was involved. That's not quite "suing Apple," but again, the details are vague. It's also not clear what "hacked her laptop" means... or why Apple would have the details. Is there anyone out there who has actual details beyond the absolutely awful press reports?

You may recall the story from late last year of the young woman whose sister had a birthday party, where part of the festivities was going to see the Twilight: New Moon movie. Since it's pretty common for people to record part of events such as birthday parties, this woman, Samantha Tumpach, kept filming part of the party, and that included some snippets from the movie. Because of that, the theater had her arrested under the MPAA's favorite anti-camcording laws. She ended up spending two nights in jail, and and even the movie's director claimed the whole thing was "terribly unfair." The theater and prosecutors stood by the arrest for a while... until finally dropping the charges.

At the time, Tumpach suggested she might sue the theater, but it looks like it took seven months to get everything in order to do just that. Tumpach is now suing the theater company, Muvico, over the arrest, saying that she wasn't warned, and that even the MPAA had told the theater to just delete the content and file a report. But, the lawsuit claims, the theater went further in pressing charges because of the possibility of collecting a monetary reward that was promised to theaters that provide info on bootleggers:

"Buckus signed the criminal complaint in hopes of collecting a reward for providing information that leads to the arrest and conviction of a person engaged in video piracy when he very well knew that she was guilty of no such act."

When rumors of her planned lawsuit first came out, we pointed out that the Illinois law in quesiton appears to make the theater's actions perfectly legal, so there's probably not much chance of the lawsuit succeeding. However, it does highlight the perverse incentives created by the MPAA in its mad rush to both pass anti-camcording laws like this one, and then to incentivize theaters to press charges against anyone, no matter what the circumstances.

Apparently, the producers of the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker haven't paid attention to what's happened on the internet over the past decade. Despite the massive levels of backlash against the RIAA for its "sue consumers" strategy, the folks behind Hurt Locker are preparing to sue tens of thousands of people for unauthorized file sharing of the movie. Apparently, they've signed up with the relatively new operation US Copyright Group, that is trying to copy the strategy used by ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons in the UK, where they send out thousands upon thousands of "pre-settlement" offers to get people to pay up. This process has lead to condemnation from politicians (who have called it a scam) and lawyers being barred from practice and being disciplined by regulatory boards.

But, apparently, that's of no concern to Hurt Locker's producers, or to Thomas Dunlap, the lawyer behind this scorched earth sue 'em all campaign. They may learn -- quite quickly -- about the backlash suing your biggest fans can cause. It's hard to think of a strategic move that will make things worse than this particular move. Have they not noticed what happened to Metallica after that band tried to sue its fans? Lots of people were interested in the movie after it won the Oscar, and plenty of people have been renting it. Yes, lots of people have been downloading it and sharing it as well, but that's not going to stop one way or the other. But in attacking people who want to watch your movie not just with legal threats, but with a full on lawsuit is ridiculous on any level. I actually had Hurt Locker in my rental queue, but there's no way I'm renting it now. I have no desire to support movie makers who would go to such ridiculous lengths for no good reason.

In the meantime, Dunlap and US Copyright Group are now claiming that 75% of ISPs have "cooperated fully." That's a very different story than we heard back in March -- at which time only one ISP had cooperated, and others seemed pretty skeptical. In fact, in that original case, the fact that ISPs cooperated was even more questionable after it came to light that the copyright in question was not registered in time. If it's true that most ISPs are cooperating and handing over IP address info, based on such sketchy proof, that would be a dangerous precedent. What happened to ISPs insisting they would never just hand over such information?

The Video Professor is the company that is notoriously litigious over critics of its marketing practices -- and just a few months ago even sent us a threatening email after we wrote a post about some of the company's actions. After a quick discussion between lawyers, the company agreed that it would not take action against us. But its lawyers have still been busy elsewhere -- though, the company also seems to lose a lot of lawsuits. This particular one involved Amazon.com, and The Video Professor's annoyance that Amazon had bid on the keywords "video professor" on various ad platforms. Of course, given that Amazon might be selling either products from The Video Professor or some of its competitors, that's a perfectly reasonable (and lawful) use of keyword advertising. The trademark does not give the trademark holder complete control over the mark.

Either way, it looks like the Video Professor has lost again on this one, even if the trademark analysis didn't even come into play. It turns out that way back whenever the company had signed an earlier deal with Amazon to be a vendor on Amazon, it had also signed a vendor agreement that included a "perpetual trademark license." Summary judgment, case closed.

Joe Mullin, in his usual incredibly thorough manner, has a detailed blog post about Google emerging victorious in a patent infringement lawsuit in East Texas, against one of many non-practicing entities to sue Google claiming patent infringement in the last few years (Mullin notes 46 filed since 2007). In this case, a husband and wife team received two patents (7,240,025 and 7,249,059) on putting ads on other websites, and claimed that Google's AdSense infringed. While there was no assertion whatsoever that Google got the idea from these patents -- and everyone seems to recognize that Google came up with, implemented and built up AdSense entirely independently, the holder of the patent thought he deserved 20% of all of Google's AdSense profits. Oh, and the kicker? He never even finished building the system himself, because the programming was beyond him:

While being questioned by one of his lawyers, Dean told the jury that his limited knowledge of code-writing--derived from a junior college programming class--wasn't sufficient to allow him to complete the project. Instead, he hired his programming teacher to finish the job. Unfortunately, Dean and Stone ran out of money before the teacher was done. Dean insisted to the jury, though, that he could have finished the project...

And yet he felt he deserves 20% of all of Google's AdSense revenue? Someone is clearly overvaluing the idea vs. the implementation. Thankfully, though, the jury actually recognized that Google was the victim here. Beyond finding that Google didn't infringe, the jury also found parts of the two patents to be invalid.

As Mullin notes, Google appears to be one of a rather small number of big tech companies who are willing to stand up to such bogus patent lawsuits, rather than just paying them off to go away. Many other companies realize that it's cheaper to just pay off the patent holder than to fight it in court, but Google recognizes -- correctly -- that this just encourages more lawsuits of the same nature, and perpetuates the problem.

After already targeting a bunch of users of a popular Lithuanian BitTorrent tracker, Microsoft has apparently now tried suing the owner of the torrent tracker itself, though the guy claims he stopped running it at the end of last year. But, again, it seems backwards to sue the operator of a tracker, when that tracker does not host or transmit any copyrighted material itself. On top of that, Microsoft has sued for $43 million, when Lithuanian law apparently limits the potential damages in this case to $53,000. Either way, due to the case, the (previous?) owner of the site has had his assets frozen -- which seems pretty extreme based on just an accusation, rather than a conviction.