legal fight

While we still think the producers of the movie Hurt Locker are crazy for trying to sue thousands of people who downloaded their movie, we certainly supported their position in a different legal fight.

In early 2010, a soldier named Jeffrey Sarver sued, claiming that the movie was based on his life.

As Stephan Kinsella notes, "live by IP, die by IP." You may recall the infamous legal fight over who owns the Bratz dolls.

I won't go through the full history, but basically Mattel claimed that it owned the rights to Bratz dolls, because the creator of those dolls worked at Mattel (though not in a doll designing job) at the time he developed the dolls (not during work time).

When Zediva launched, we already knew it was going to face a legal fight from the MPAA and the movie studios.

The company lets people stream movies they want to see, but tries to get around the legal licensing issues by only streaming directly from internet connected DVD players, playing legitimately acquired DVDs.

Their argument is that it's really no different than renting a movie and bringing it to your own DVD player.

We've been talking about how ridiculously aggressive Sony has been lately in enforcing its intellectual property rights concerning PS3s, so it seems like there might be a bit of karmic retribution in the fact that a shipment of PS3s has been seized in Europe as part of an ongoing legal fight with LG over patents covering parts of the PS3.

TorrentFreak notes that a guy who was apparently sued for uploading some porn movies from Liberty Media agreed to settle the lawsuit just four days later with a settlement that claims he'll pay $250,000.

What's odd, of course, is that seems like a rather large settlement -- especially done so fast, with no apparently legal fight.

A few years back, we covered the legal fight pitting ASCAP against Yahoo and RealNetworks, where the two internet companies were told to pay up based on a ridiculously arbitrary fee formula, including a totally made up multiplier called the "music-use-adjustment-fraction." The really scary part was that it calculated the revenue based on all of Yahoo's revenue.

Law professor Peter Friedman has an interesting discussion on his blog about who owns Franz Kafka's papers, based on a recent New York Times piece about a big legal fight over the matter.

Yes, Kafka died back in 1924.

Back in April, we noted the latest in the rather long saga of Tiffany's legal fight against eBay. Tiffany had sued eBay, claiming that the online auction site was legally responsible for policing the site for counterfeit Tiffany items that users were selling.

Despite the lack of a clear safe harbor (a la the DMCA or the CDA), the appeals court agreed with the district court that eBay was not liable for the actions of third parties on its site.

It looks like toymaker MGA has decided that if the momentum is turning in its ongoing legal fight with competitor Mattel, it might as well go all in.

As you may recall, Mattel had sued MGA over its (extraordinarily successful) Bratz lines of dolls, because the designer who came up with the concept had done so while working at Mattel.

THREsq has an interesting story about how the guy, Louie Psihoyos, who won an Oscar for best documentary this year for The Cove, apparently has a pretty quick legal trigger finger against anyone using a photograph he took 15 years ago.

He's sued a bunch of companies over the years, and the latest is the BBC and CBS.