Patty points us to a Reddit post where someone claims that after posting a negative Yelp review, the company being reviewed threatened the reviewer with legal action, claiming that the review violated a contract that the customer had signed. The business apparently is one that repairs damaged hard drives or recovers data off of them. The customer was clearly not satisfied. Where it gets strange though is that the company claims that the negative review violates the signed contract. As per standard Reddit practices, the details of the company are redacted, so it's a bit difficult to dig into the facts here. However, it seems likely that this threat is more about getting the person to back down than any realistic shot at legal action. One would hope the company would realize that if it actually took legal action, that information would spread far and wide across the internet, and would probably do significantly more harm than any single bad review on Yelp...

btr1701 alerts us to the news that Houston residents have voted to get rid of red light cameras around Houston. The vote was actually pretty close, with 52.82% wanting to ditch the cameras, and 47.18% wanting to keep them. Of course, the cameras might not disappear all that quickly. It turns out that the city -- which has made $44 million from the cameras -- has a contract with the camera provider that runs for another four years. There is a 120-day cancellation policy, so the absolute soonest that the cameras might turn off is four months or so in the future. However, the city is currently reviewing its "options." And, of course, any citation sent out while this is going on is still a valid citation, so Houston drivers shouldn't run around thinking that the cameras are already off.

Apparently, the campaign of BJ Lawson, who just lost in his bid to take a Congressional seat away from Rep. David Price in North Carolina, claimed that actor Morgan Freeman did the voiceover on their recent campaign ad: The campaign claimed that the ad was "resonating" with voters. However, after the press started asking about the ad, Lawson's campaign announced that Freeman had recorded the voiceover for the ad (at less than his usual rates, implying his further support of Lawson's campaign), Freeman denounced the campaign as lying, saying that he did not record the commercial, does not support the candidate and that "no one who represents me ever has ever authorized the use of my name, voice or any other likeness in support of Mr. Lawson or his candidacy."

Following that, the Lawson campaign pulled down its press release announcing that Freeman had done the ad, and replaced it with an announcement claiming they were scammed by a contractor named MEI Political, and going so far as to actually post the contract and emails that had gone back and forth over this (which show a fee of $4,500, which you have to assume is way below Freeman's going rate):

If you look at the emails the campaign had initially suggested a play on the "Priceless" Mastercard commercials, and the guy from MEI warns them that Mastercard has been known to sue over such copying, so at least that time MEI knew to warn about potential intellectual property issues.

The guy from MEI Political, Ben Mathis, has responded with a press release and by releasing other emails himself, claiming that all along he was clear that it was Morgan Freeman's "voice double" and stating that the campaign could not claim Morgan Freeman made the ad: Reading through all of this, it does sound like there was some pretty serious miscommunications going on. From what's been presented by both sides, it looks like MEI told the Lawson campaign that it had some actual celebrities and some voice doubles, making it clear in the initial email that with the doubles, you couldn't name the celebrities (even though many people would "recognize" the voice). However, it was in a later email that MEI appears to have lumped all of the available "voices" together in one list, and the Lawson campaign either did not remember the difference or chose to ignore it. However, it sure does look like the contract the two parties signed flat-out names Morgan Freeman, and not his double, which could put MEI in hot water. MEI also claims that it made clear, via a phone conversation, not to use Freeman's name, and the Lawson campaign did so anyway. Also, amusingly, he asks them to keep his name out of it, which the campaign clearly did not do.

Of course, it will be interesting to see if any lawsuits actually come out of this, and who, exactly, sues whom? Freeman, conceivably, could have a publicity rights claim against the campaign and against MEI. The campaign could have a suit against MEI as well if it can make the argument that the contract indicates it would actually be Freeman, not his voice double. And, you could even see how MEI might have a case against the campaign, after the campaign claimed it was "tricked" by "a political mercenary." Of course, with the election over, and Lawson losing, they all might just let it slide... Either way, while some might claim this is a perfect example of where publicity rights make sense, it seems like good old traditional fraud statutes and contract law could handle any necessary legal lifting here instead.

We just recently wrote about how circuit court judge Richard Posner had admitted to not reading the boilerplate legalese on his mortgage agreement, and wondered why such things were then considered binding. Taking it up a notch, now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has admitted that he doesn't read the fine print on websites or medicines and that this "is a problem."

Answering a student question, Roberts admitted he doesn't usually read the computer jargon that is a condition of accessing websites, and gave another example of fine print: the literature that accompanies medications.... It has "the smallest type you can imagine and you unfold it like a map," he said. "It is a problem," he added, "because the legal system obviously is to blame for that." Providing too much information defeats the purpose of disclosure, since no one reads it, he said. "What the answer is," he said, "I don't know."

Well, that's comforting. Of course, I'm less interested in "the answer" to all that small type, and more interested in the answer to the question of how those things can be considered legally binding when even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court doesn't read them...

College sports have become a big business. That's no secret. We see it all the time, and at times that's used to stifle elements of free speech, such as in making fan-created t-shirts and such illegal. Now it's going even further. Romenesko points us to the news that the University of Kentucky, a state-funded university, has banned the distribution of a free student newspaper at the University's Commonwealth Stadium before football games. Apparently, UK has a marketing contract with sports licensing giant IMG, which they believe gives IMG a monopoly on any media efforts around the stadium. Of course, plenty of folks are pointing out that this is a pretty clear First Amendment problem. It's a public government-owned entity, forbidding the distribution of speech. The contract with IMG is meaningless as you can't contract away others' free speech rights. It sounds like folks are gearing up for a legal challenge here, which should be worth following.

Michael Scott points us to a discussion noting that famed circuit court judge Richard Posner has admitted that when he recently took out a mortgage, he didn't bother reading the legal language, which leads to stories of many other lawyers admitting they don't bother reading the legal language of many of the things they sign. And yet... those things are still considered binding. I think most people realize that the language of such things will almost never actually matter, but of course, when it does matter, it really does matter. And, of course, that leads to a general question: why do we even bother with all this ridiculous legal language if no one's really agreeing to it?

Earlier this year, we wrote about how publishing giant Reed Elsevier had decided to sue the band The Vandals, for supposedly violating a previous agreement not to use an album logo that parodied Reed's publication, Daily Variety:
While the band had agreed not to use the logo, images with the logo were being found on various websites, but it was other sites using it, not the band promoting it itself. Furthermore, it's clearly a parody, which should be legal (though it's complicated by the band's agreement to stop using the logo, so the contractual issues take precedence over the trademark/parody questions). What's amazing is that after all the negative attention being put on Reed over such a ridiculously minor issue, the company refuses to back down and is still pushing forward with the case. It's difficult to see why this makes sense in any way. Reed is a publishing giant. It hardly needs to win this lawsuit, and it's got nothing to do with protecting its trademark any more. Besides, this lawsuit has done a hell of a lot more to promote the old logo than anything that happened before.

Where this gets even more interesting (or potentially dangerous, depending on your opinion), is that the band's bassist, Joe Escalante, is a former entertainment lawyer who is representing the band in the case. Despite not being a litigator, he's been learning about litigation and even got himself admitted to practice law in Delaware, where the lawsuit was filed (the band is trying to get the case moved to LA). Escalante has been publicizing all of the aspects of the case, and the band is even holding a "fundraising" concert to fund the legal defense.

The story of the guy who claims to hold a contract that means he owns 84% of Facebook keeps getting stranger. We already noted that Facebook's first official response in court was to say that it was unsure if Mark Zuckerberg signed the contract (which comes close to indicating they think he did...) but TechCrunch points us to an interview with the guy, Paul Ceglia, where it's also revealed that someone else now thinks they may actually hold the rights to that contract. Seriously.

Basically, when Ceglia hired Zuckerberg to do some work for him, in the contract that allegedly includes this ownership stake in Facebook, Ceglia was allegedly working for someone else. The article talks to a guy named Andrew Logan, who ran a competing service to the one that Ceglia had hired Zuckerberg to build. However, Ceglia was actually trying to set up that company while working for Logan, and Logan says that anything Ceglia got, he owns:

"We're going to lay claim that I own it," said Logan. "He was under contract to me."

Apparently the two were involved in a legal dispute over this in the past, and Logan's lawyers are reviewing the settlement agreement.

If you're playing along with the home game, this has to be at least the fifth or sixth person to claim they actually owned some large chunk of Facebook, but this time it's because of a bizarre contract Zuckerberg may have signed with a guy who had hired Zuckerber to program a totally unrelated project... and that guy was supposedly secretly building a competitor to the product of the company who employed him. So that employer now says that any rights to Facebook in that contract belong to him. If I didn't know any better, I'd almost assume this level of insanity was actually planted as marketing material for that fictional Facebook movie coming out this fall.

Separately, it is worth noting that the interview with Ceglia allows him to give a reason why he waited this long to point out this contract. He claims he totally forgot about it. The only reason it came up is because Ceglia is in a legal fight with New York over taking $200,000 from customers of a wood-pellet fuel business and never delivering any wood pellets. In the process of defending himself, he apparently went through some boxes of old files... where he claims to have found the contract.

Separately, after all this came to pass, Ceglia finally signed up for his first Facebook account:

After he filed his lawsuit, Ceglia did take enough interest in the company to sign up for a Facebook account on July 22, his birthday.

"I think it's a great service," he said.

Like many of the 500 million people who use Facebook, Ceglia said he's gotten back in touch with some old high school friends.

Late last year, we wrote about a legal fight, where Random House was fighting some of its authors who claimed that their old publishing contracts did not cover ebooks. Those authors wanted to go off and publish ebooks via other partners (or even directly themselves). Random House tried to claim that even though the contracts didn't specifically cover ebooks, that it was more or less implied. The problem, of course, was that Random House had already lost a case about this very issue years back. So, this April, the company was forced to concede with the one author they were fighting -- though it claimed this was an "exception."

Except some other big name, old time authors know better. They've been realizing that they could be free to take their ebook versions elsewhere, and now they're doing exactly that. A bunch of really well known authors, working via their agents, have decided to route around their publishers and offer some of the most popular books of all time as ebooks directly on Amazon's Kindle, without going through a publishing house. Among the books released through this effort are works from Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson, John Updike, William Burroughs and Saul Bellow along with many others. Basically, some of the biggest names in literature from the 20th century.

Of course, more recent authors won't have this luxury directly, since new publishing contracts for books cover ebooks as well, but it will be interesting to see how well these new ebooks do for authors -- and if it leads to more authors realizing they can just self-publish outside of the traditional publisher system. I'm still not sure that makes as much sense, say, as going "indie" from a music standpoint, as publishers still offer a tremendous amount of value that's hard to recreate, but at the very least, it could open the door to more specialized "indie" publishers, who are more author-friendly.

Has there ever been a company with more bizarre claims to ownership than Facebook? There have already been two high profile claims of others who say that Mark Zuckerberg "took" the idea of Facebook from them. The one involving the company ConnectU at least had a strong enough claim to get Facebook to pay up. Some of the details in that case suggest at least marginally underhanded activities on the part of Zuckerberg. Other claims have been more ridiculous, and there are a few former "co-founders" who clearly were not too happy about how things worked out.

But this latest claim may be the most bizarre of all. Some guy, who is currently fighting charges in New York State of taking $200,000 from customers for a wood-pellet fuel business (you can't make this stuff up), apparently claims to have come up with a contract from Zuckerberg that offered him 50% of Facebook for designing the company's website. The terms of the "deal" seem strange: a $1,000 fee and a 50 percent stake in the product plus an additional 1 percent interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed. This makes no sense, of course. First of all, why would Zuckerberg give away 50% of the site to the guy he hired to design it... and why would he offer the guy additional percentage points if the guy was slow in finishing? So, the whole thing sounds farfetched. Even if, somehow, this contract turns out to be real, some have pointed out that the statute of limitations in New York probably makes it meaningless.