legal threat

A whole bunch of you have been sending in Markus Persson's blog post about the the legal threat from game developer Bethesda over his attempt to name his new game, Scroll.

We've written about Markus, better known as notch, a few times.

As we've been discussing, Apple is on a quixotic battle to claim that "App Store" really stands for Apple Store, and that only it can use the obviously generic phrase.

Last month, we wrote about the ridiculous situation in which appropriation artist Jeff Koons, who famously "appropriates" works from elsewhere to make his art, had threatened to sue a store in San Francisco, called Park Life, for selling balloon dog bookends.

Slashdot recently pointed us to the fact that OSNews received a legal threat from Commodore USA for publishing an article that was highly skeptical of Commodore's Amiga plans.

Reader jjmsan alerts us to a story that shows that various luxury brands suing service providers rather than those actually responsible doesn't just happen online, but can happen offline as well.

Apparently, luxury goods maker Coach is suing the city of Chicago, because some vendors were selling counterfeit goods at the Maxwell Street Market.

A whole bunch of people have sent in variations on this story, which involves scientist Michael Mann, one of the main figures involved in the recent (misleading and totally blown out of proportion) controversy over climate change research, threatening legal action against people who made a satire video, which includes his image.

Honestly, it's hard to think of a move more likely to backfire than this.

Allen Harkleroad alerts us to the news that a company called CyberDefender is a bit upset at Harkleroad's recent stories that pointed out that two brands, advertising heavily about cleaning up your computer (MyCleanPC and DoubleMySpeed), appear to be connected to CyberDefender, despite attempts to hide the connection.

He then highlighted some complaints against all three brands.

Richard Corsale writes in to let us know about how popular electronics e-commerce site NewEgg apparently received 300 totally fake Intel processors and at least some of them were sold.

They're not processors at all. They're just made to look like them from the outside.

WSJ.com: "In an effort to avert any legal threat that might discourage the adoption of Linux, a group of Microsoft rivals is about to acquire a set of patents formerly owned by the software giant."