temporary restraining order

Early December, Megaupload’s ‘Mega Song’ was on its way to becoming a viral hit, only to be cut down from YouTube by a Universal Music takedown demand.

In response, Megaupload filed a lawsuit against Universal and YouTube reinstated the video.

We recently blogged about a case where Chanel obtained surprisingly broad remedies against domain names associated with foreign "rogue" websites which allegedly sold counterfeit Chanel items.

Much of the relief Chanel sought and obtained in that case overlapped with relief that the proposed SOPA law would provide to rightsowners.

When you watch politicians and judges make total fools of themselves on technology issues, sometimes you wonder if there just isn't a better system overall out there.

Take, for example, the already ridiculous situation in which George Hotz (Geohot) has been gagged for his basic hack of the PS3, allowing it to re-enable a feature that Sony used to include, but has since removed.

Groklaw: " Wired's David Kravetz reports that George Hotz's lawyers plan to ask US District Court Judge Susan Illiston to reconsider her recent temporary restraining order and the requirement to surrender all his computers and peripherals and retrieve from the Internet any information he put there..."

A few weeks ago, we talked about Sony's attempt to get an injunction against a guy who figured out how to hack the Sony PS3 to "jailbreak" it and reinstate the "Other OS' feature allowing people to install alternative operating systems, such as Linux, on their PS3s, which Sony unilaterally deleted.

Earlier this year, we highlighted the ridiculousness and troubling implications of various court rulings that held that only sports teams or universities themselves could legally offer sports paraphernalia such as t-shirts, completely wiping out the tradition of fan-created t-shirts.

The reasoning behind those rulings was tremendously problematic, and now may be extended much further, showing how those original restrictions could have huge free speech implications.

Last week, we wrote about a judge who issued a temporary restraining order on the National Law Journal, which was about to publish a story claiming that the FTC was investigating POM, makers of pomegranate juice.

Apparently, the judge had already ordered the documents of such an investigation be sealed, but a court clerk had been slow in getting around to it, and the reporter found the info while it was still public.

Found via the Citizen Media Law Project is a report about how The National Law Journal was barred from publishing information it had obtained legally in reporting about a dispute between a law firm and one of its former clients about fees.

According to The National Law Journal, D.C.