Some updates to earlier stories we’ve covered:
- Spyware maker Zango, which embarked on a strategy of suing all the anti-spyware vendors that were calling its products spyware, has dropped its lawsuit against PC Tools, the maker of Spyware Doctor. (We covered the filing of the lawsuit on May 23.) Presumably it chose to drop the suit because it just lost a similar one against Kapersky Lab, with a federal court ruling that antispyware companies’ decisions of this sort are protected from suit.
Eric Goldman has the details, including links to all the relevant decisions.
- We reported on August 21st on the “crackpot” libel suit against blogger PZ Myers for an unflattering book review. Stuart Pivar, who filed the suit to great derision in the blogosphere, apparently dropped the suit a week later. (Even if the suit had legal merit, it was filed in the wrong court, so dismissal was just bowing to the inevitable; in theory, Pivar could refile in the appropriate court, but after the way constitutional law professor Peter Irons dissected the complaint, I think Myers ought to feel safe.) Free hint to readers: defamation lawsuits are almost always a bad idea. All they do is provide publicity to the very claims one is trying to suppress. Defamation lawsuits against prominent bloggers are even less sensible.
- Two years ago, the Illinois Supreme Court put an end to one of the more fraudulent “consumer fraud” lawsuits ever filed, a $10 billion lawsuit against Philip Morris for marketing “light” cigarettes in accordance with federal guidelines. But even though the state’s highest court ordered the case to be dismissed, Madison County repeat offender Steve Tillery went back to a local court run by notorious Judge Nicholas Byron and tried to reopen the lawsuit. Finally, last month the Illinois Supreme Court definitively slapped down Tillery, telling Byron to dismiss the case.
(Overlawyered’s sister site Point of Law has been covering this case.)
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