In May 2006, 14-year-old Texas girl “Julie Doe” listed herself as 18 on her MySpace profile (so she could circumvent the site’s child safety features) and snuck out of her house to surreptitiously meet with a boy she met on MySpace the previous month. Unfortunately for her, the boy was also lying; Pete Solis was not a high-school athlete, but a 19-year-old that (allegedly) raped her. (Solis claims the sex was consensual and that he didn’t know about the illegal age difference, though knowledge ususally isn’t a defense in statutory rape cases.)

The family blamed MySpace and sued in multiple jurisdictions, omitting Solis from the most recent iteration of the suit. The suit was dismissed under the website hosting immunity protections of the Communications Decency Act; and Friday, the dismissal was affirmed by a unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit (via Childs). We covered the suit in detail in 2006; for that, and other MySpace litigation, see our MySpace tag.

In April, Solis pleaded guilty to reduced charges of felony injury to a child, and will serve 90 days over the course of five years, and will register as a sex offender. (Jen Biundo, “Buda teen gets 90 days in jail, seven years on sex offender list”, The Free Press (Buda), April 23). His attorney? Adam Reposa, known for other reasons. One presume’s Solis’s even more ludicrous lawsuit against MySpace has met a similar fate.

It must be frustrating to own (or, depending on how one views the legalities, “own”) a patent on the JPEG photo format technology but then not actually be able to move in to collect royalties from “just about every web site that uses an image”. (Asher Hawkins, Forbes, May 5).

A cease and desist letter from Monster Cable to Blue Jeans Cable, alleging various sorts of infringement of Monster’s intellectual property, draws a ferocious response from Blue Jeans’ president Kurt Denke, formerly a practicing lawyer. “Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster’s, in form or in function, the better … It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind.” And much more (Audioholics; Slashdot).

Both via Ron Coleman: “Deutsche Telekom / T-Mobile demands Engadget Mobile discontinue using the color magenta” (Engadget, Mar. 31)(via). And Major League Baseball apparently makes bold to own all combinations of characteristic team colors and “baseball lettering” on shirts, even when the actual shirt message is something unrelated to baseball, such as “Obama” (Susan Scafidi/CounterfeitChic, Mar. 18) (via).

…as well as your keychain drives, backup tapes, laptops and network servers. New rules of federal procedure will make it more likely that a litigation opponent will show up on your doorstep with such a demand. (Martha Neil, “Opponent Computer Searches Likelier Under Revised Civ Pro Rule”, ABA Journal, Mar. 12; Nolan M. Goldberg, “Is Your Data Wide Open to Your Opponent?”, National Law Journal, Mar. 12).

The Troll Tracker blog is down shortly after (or before?) a lawsuit filed by a plaintiffs’ attorney and son of federal judge T. John Ward, Jr. sued the blogger and his employer, Cisco, over a post critical of Ward and attorney Eric Albritton. [Prior Art blog via ATL] I couldn’t find the complaint on-line, but I’ll track it down over the weekend. Earlier: Feb. 26; earlier in the series.

Has the time come? (Roger Parloff, Fortune “Legal Pad”, Feb. 28).

Bob Sullivan, MSNBC “Red Tape”, Feb. 12:

How much compensation does a consumer deserve for the loss of a laptop computer loaded with personal information? Raelyn Campbell figures it’s $54 million — if you throw in a little extra for lost time and frustration.

Six months after bringing a damaged laptop computer into a Best Buy electronics store for repairs, and three months after the firm admitted losing it, Campbell filed the whopper of a lawsuit recently in Washington, D.C., Superior Court….

In Best Buy; technology

America’s Future Foundation is holding a January 16 panel on this topic:

In less than a decade, Google has grown from a Ph.D. research project to be the indispensable tool of the information economy. With the objective of making all information instantly and universally accessible, Google now controls the principal index to the internet and the email traffic of millions, while adding new features such as maps replete with street-level photos cataloging the non-virtual world. As governments around the world seek to harness this information for good or evil, please join us on January 16th to discuss what we stand to gain and lose from this relentless indexing of information.

Joining us in the discussion will be Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Amber Taylor of O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Moderating this discussion will be Chris Pope of the American Enterprise Institute.

Free for AFF members, $5 for non-members.

Meatpacker Hormel has met with defeat in its courtroom attempt to invalidate the registration of the trademark SpamArrest for an email-screening service (Ron Coleman (Nov. 27; TTABlog, Nov. 28). Our earlier coverage: Jul. 9, 2003 and Apr. 19, 2007.

Legislation on the Hill would ban them; sponsors include Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.). (Paul Caron, Nov. 16, via Elefant; Dennis Crouch, Patently-O, Nov. 13). Earlier: Oct. 21, 2006.

Is it legal? (Torie Bosch, “The Explainer”, Slate, Oct. 30).

Writes Jack Bogdanich (Oct. 25): “‘Sam Adams’ is a very, very, very common name. People who brand their companies with a very, very, very common name have to live with the consequences. Letting supporters of a real politician named Sam Adams express their support for him with an appropriately named web domain or two is just something that Boston Beer is going to have to live with.” More: Lattman, Oct. 25.

What if any are the legal issues raised by employers’ use of Facebook and similar social networking sites to check out job applicants? (George Lenard, CollegeRecruiter.com blog, Sept. 1; via Between Lawyers). What about prosecutors who decide to use it to gather incriminating evidence? (Arbitrary and Capricious, Sept. 16, via Legal Blog Watch).

Speaking of Facebook, Overlawyered’s own recently launched group there is now up to 171 members, but that’s way short of the number that would cause Ted to empty his wallet for charity as promised, and there’s only 24 hours or so to go on his offer. Anyone for a last-minute surge?

The AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest’s patent law program tomorrow has a tremendous lineup. Jack Calfee and Claude Barfield will be discussing their new monograph, Biotechnology and the Patent System; the general counsels of Eli Lilly and of Cisco, among others, will be debating the pending patent reform bill. The event is open to the public and will be webcast, as well.

“Three and a half years after launching a high-profile legal attack on Linux, The SCO Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. …the company’s legal case was dealt a crushing blow in August, when the federal judge overseeing its case, Dale Kimball, concluded “that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights.” Presumably the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, which was pursuing SCO’s ambitious anti-Linux claims on contingency, has had to scale back its expectations of a payday (Stephen Shankland, CNet, Sept. 14). Earlier: Nov. 6, 2003, Nov. 13, 2004. More: Roger Parloff, Fortune “Legal Pad”.

It seems everyone else is (Michael Myser, Wired News, Aug. 21).

Reader Jim Finkel writes:

Re your post from the New Orleans paper on the fine print in contracts. As I have turned off my cookies (the usual paranoia), to read your article, you have to answer questions and assent for each of the following two pages of the three page article. So even reading the article about click-through, you have to click through and read the fine print. There has to be a point here.

In technology