legal

Microsoft said on Monday that it has filed suit against Immersion, a company whose technology adds tactile feedback to joysticks and other controllers.

Immersion had originally sued Microsoft, along with Sony, back in 2002., but the two companies reached a settlement in 2003. Under that deal Microsoft agreed to pay Immersion $26 million for licensing rights and for a stake in the company. However, Microsoft said Monday that Immersion has not lived up other terms of that deal, including a provision that requires Immersion to pay Microsoft "based on certain business and IP licensing arrangements."

"We entered … Read more

A blog post at Consumerist.com offering tips on buying from Dell drew a nasty cease-and-desist letter from the company's attorney and then, in quick succession, a chastened apology from a Dell manager.

The original post, titled "22 Confessions Of A Former Dell Sales Manager," appeared last Thursday. The same afternoon, Dell attorney Tracy J. Holland sent a nastygram to Consumerist saying the post must be deleted because "it contains information that is confidential and proprietary to Dell."

The offending post included advice like this: "Thursday is the first day of new promotions. If … Read more

A lawyer-rating site that inexplicably gave convicted felons higher numeric scores than law school deans is, in a move that was entirely predictable, being sued.

Avvo.com, which launched on June 5, compiles data from state bar associations and tries to compute a numeric score between 1 and 10 for nearly every attorney in the country. It's received $14 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners, co-founded by Microsoft alum and Avvo board member Brad Silverberg.

But the scores have proved to be somewhat arbitrary. Our review of the site noted that Avvo execs or board members … Read more

When Google recently charged that Microsoft was engaging in anticompetitive behavior because its Windows Vista operating system doesn't accommodate Google's Desktop Search software, the U.S. government rejected the complaint. But at least one state lawmaker is willing to investigate Google's allegations: Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general, said Monday that he was taking Google's allegations seriously and would continue to look into the matter. Several other state attorneys general are also participating; Blumenthal's office did not put out a formal statement, but confirmed that the attorney general was working on such an investigation.

"… Read more

Listpic, the controversial visual front-end for Craigslist, has made the switch to classifieds service Oodle.com. The change comes after last week's cease and desist order from Craigslist, which forced Listpic to discontinue scraping data from the popular classifieds service. Listpic was apparently sucking up so much of Craigslist's bandwidth that the site's performance had suffered. Craigslist then fired back with legal action.

Oodle.com is a service that aggregates classifieds listings from a number of local and national sites. It claims to let users search over 20 million listings that have been pulled from more than … Read more

Last year, an attorney representing a woman sued by the Recording Industry Association of America claimed his client is innocent and asked a federal judge to levy sanctions against the association's lawyers.

Instead, in an unexpected legal twist, U.S. District Judge Terry Means ruled on May 16 that it was entirely likely that the woman was violating copyright law via the Kazaa file-sharing program -- and ordered that her attorney be sanctioned for wasting the court's time with "frivolous" arguments.

"Frivolous motions for sanctions that harass the opposing party's attorney, chill that attorney'… Read more

After finding itself in a three-year dispute with Microsoft, Savvysoft wanted to make darn sure it didn't pick a fight with anyone else.

Microsoft had taken issue with the small New York company's use of the name TurboExcel for its software, which turns Excel spreadsheets into Web services or computer code, allowing calculations to be done faster and over the Web.

After hearing from Microsoft's lawyers back in 2004, it has become a part-time job for Savvysoft workers to try to come up with a new name for the product.

Marketing director LeeAnn Chen estimates the 35-employee … Read more

There's already a federal indictment of a woman accused of running a call girl ring in Washington D.C. A deputy secretary of state, Randall Tobias, has resigned. Tobias admits to using the services of Pamela Martin & Associates only for back rubs. Deborah Palfrey, the woman who ran Pamela Martin services, is gaining some notoriety in the blogosphere.

Palfrey is threatening to call many prominent D.C. men into court to testify on her behalf. Clearly, Tobias would happily back up Palfrey's claim that her service was about massage and fantasy, not prostitution.

So where are the … Read more