legal

Digital ad firm Agency.com has sued rival iCrossing for poaching a number of high-level employees and clients, including former Agency.com CEO Charles Donald Scales, according to a complaint filed in a Texas state court last Thursday.

The complaint alleges "massive employee raiding, customer solicitation in violation of contractual and common law prohibitions against same, breach of the express terms of a settlement agreement...gross acts of disloyalty and breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation of Agency.com's confidential information and trade secrets and other wrongs," and seeks at least $19.5 million in damages.

Neither company … Read more

Apple and Psystar have agreed to pursue a mediated settlement to their legal dispute over Psystar's Open Computers.

The Mac Observer turned up a court filing from earlier this month in the Apple-Psystar case noting that the two parties have agreed to participate in the Alternative Dispute Resolution process. As you may recall, Apple sued Psystar earlier this year for copyright infringement after Psystar began selling low-cost Open Computers with Mac OS X preinstalled. Psystar then countersued Apple on antitrust grounds.

ADR, as it is known, is a way to bypass the costly legal process as well as keep … Read more

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has put out a statement to the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDS), which President George W. Bush signed on Monday along with the Protect Our Children Act.

In short: Facebook supports the act and says it will cooperate with it.

"We see KIDS as an important tool to prevent inappropriate outreach from ever occurring," Kelly wrote in a post on the company blog about the law, which mandates that registered sex offenders have all identifying Internet names, including e-mail addresses, on file with the National Sex Offender Registry. &… Read more

There's more rumbling in Europe about Apple's iTunes Store, and this time, it comes from Norway, where, according to Reuters, a consumer agency has announced plans for legal action against Apple and what it says is unfair copyright restriction.

"I want (Apple) to make their services interoperable so that you can play music bought on iTunes on other devices, including mobile phones," Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjørn Erik Thon told Reuters on Tuesday. Consumer agencies in Norway have been making this complaint for at least two years.

Songs purchased from the iTunes Store, except for … Read more

When the news broke earlier this week that Facebook had hired D.C. veteran Ted Ullyot as its general counsel, many news outlets (this one included) took it to mean that this was the first time that the young company had hired executive-level internal counsel.

Not so: as reported by Law.com, Facebook's prior general counsel, Rudy Gadre, had left the company in July "to move to Seattle and spend more time with his family." Gadre had actually been at Facebook since 2006.

Regardless of the validity of the ages-old "spend more time with the family&… Read more

Facebook's appointment of Ted Ullyot as its first general counsel might spook some in freewheeling Silicon Valley: he served as chief of staff to former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush.

But in an interview Monday with CNET News, Ullyot said that his past resume will make it easier for the fast-growing social network to deal with Washington insiders--because he used to be one himself.

"Having served in the executive branch in Washington and also in the judicial branch, I have a pretty good understanding of those issues,&… Read more

Facebook has hired the former chief of staff to onetime U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales as its general counsel, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ted Ullyot, currently a Washington, D.C.-based partner for the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, will relocate to the Bay Area and join the Palo Alto social network next month.

He appears to have been hand-picked by Elliot Schrage, the former Google executive who joined Facebook as vice president of communications and public policy this spring, and Sheryl Sandberg, another Google alum who now serves as the company's chief operating officer.

Ullyot "… Read more

The congressional vote regarding royalty fees for Internet radio has been moved at the last minute to 11 a.m. EDT Saturday, according to Pandora, one of the start-ups that has been pushing for this vote in the wake of pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

"It has to happen tomorrow," Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad said in an interview with CNET News on Friday night. The start-up has put up a blog post encouraging fans and users to call their congressional representatives through the night to support the cause. "The timing issue that'… Read more

Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette says the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with. That's why he took down the playlist creation Web site, which became a hipster craze earlier this year, after spreading largely via word of mouth. It'll be relaunching soon, he says, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music.

"I walked away from the licensing deals," Ouelette wrote in a transparent, albeit navel-gazing letter on Muxtape's home page. He'd hired a lawyer and tried negotiating, with varied reactions from … Read more