Micrhoo

Microsoft bid $31 a share for a very vulnerable Yahoo! last night in order to combat Google's dominance in cyberspace. That would be a very interesting marriage.

TiVo Wins the Patent!

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with a lower court that the DishTV DVR violated TiVo's patent and supported the $89.6 million award to TiVo.

Now Why Is That?

From the why would a legislature ever do that section, did you know that Japan lacks any legislation preventing computer viruses? You would think that the legislature there would have moved forward to criminalize malicious software programs.

Downloaders Can Stay Private

The European Court of Justice ruled that record labels and film studios cannot demand that comapnies hand over the names and addresses of suspected download infringers, but said that countries could individually require it, but "cannot however affect the requirements of (protecting) personal data."

Investment Banks Safe

The Supreme Court also didn't take the Enron case because you can't prove that Wall Street banks colluded with Enron to inflate its stock price artificially.

What is Personal Information?

Peter Scharr, Germany's data protection commissioner, has suggested that IP should be regarded as personal data. Search engines have disagreed. We'll see if the EU takes any action on this.

Who Owns Your Used Tissues?

The Supreme Court let stand a ruling that Washington University owns various lab samples of patients and not the patients themselves. When Dr. William J. Catalona left the University, thousands of patients requested that the tissue samples be forwarded to Dr. Catalona and the University refused. The 8th Circuit said the University owned all the tissue samples and the Supreme Court upheld that.

"It's Not Us"

The Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that said that the FCC was wrong in holding that the regulation of listing of taxes and other items were not in the purview of the states ability to regulate. The reason why states want this is that many states don't allow the listing of fees and other charges, and nobody wants to see how much they are paying in taxes.

Chirs Matthews was right

Yes, you are reading the title correctly. Two weeks ago he said that Hillary Clinton is only in her position because her husband "messed around." Given that right before Bill Clinton lied to the American populace about his extramarital affairs Hillary's popularity was at an all time low, and only subsequent to the scandel and his impeachment trial did her popularity start to rise again, he's right on the money in my opinion.

New Cause for the Antartic Melting

According to a study to be published in Nature Geoscience, scientists have posited a theory that an underground volcanoe that erupted around 207 B.C., and it is still active today causing the heat from the volcanoe from melting the ice sheet.

Identity Theft

If you want to steal somebody's identity, go to Sears. If you go to managemyhome.com, you can get a lot of information about a person if you know their name, address and phone number. But do you really want to steal somebody's identity that shops at Sears?

Stock Fraud

Finally, a stock fraud case we can be happy about. After that past forty years of bad Supreme Court cases on stock fraud, we finaly have the Charter Communications case. Justice Kennedy took a strict constructionalist approach to 10(b) of the 34 Act and held that you can't sue anyone but the company for a deceptive act. Thank you Supreme Court! Thank you!

Welcome Tony Sparano!

On behalf of many other Dolphin fans, I would like to welcome our latest savior to Miami.

UK to Join International Space Station

The UK plans to join the ISS by launching the Habitat Extension Modules in 2011 that would provide additional room and equipment and attach to the Node 3 segment which will be added in 2010. It's still subject to the UK government's approval which is giving it less than an enthusiastic response.

Two Tech Deals

Oracle just came to terms with BEA Systems to purchase them for approx. $7.85 billion, and Sun Microsystems agreed to purchase MySQL for approximately $1 billion.

What's Next?

Many critics of strict constructionalism allege that the warnings of the slippery sloap is just fear mongering. Now when the US held that government can't regulate condom sales to married people and created this zone of privacy, constructionalists warned of what's going to get put into that zone. Now, the ACLU filed a brief in the Larry Craig public bathroom sex case saying that people have an expectation of privacy in a public restroom. I don't know many people who expect any sort of privacy in a public restroom.

In this weeks stupid legal news story

The Austrian Supreme Court refused to recognize a chimp as a person. Next, we'll find out that certain types of venison aren't fish.

Hillary: The Movie

I can't believe that a court has held that Hillary: The Movie is subject to campaign finance laws and that trailers are essentially capaign ads. But An Inconvient Truth wasn't?

New ID Rules

The top story of the day is the new ID Regulations from the Department of Homeland Security. Everyone's going to need to get new drivers licenses soon.

Snore

The Alaska Farm Bureau doesn't own the "Alaska Grown" label. The Division of Agriculture owns it. Just thought everyone would like to know.

Oops, the Did It Again

Once, domain name highjacking was cool. Then it wasn't. Now, Network Solutions is the bully on the block. They are grabbing the top search words on its website that people don't immediately register, and then sell it for $35 a year.

Although people are critizing Network Solutions, I don't find anything deplorable about domain name front running. Caveat Emptor. If you don't want to let them have keywords, don't register and use somebody else cheaper.

Another Net Neutrality (Sort Of)

iTunes will be scrapping their pricing policies in Europe by making prices uniform in the EU. Previously, they charged 9 cents more per song in Great Britain because of higher royalty rates.

Do Not Call

The Do-Not-Call Registry should be renewed, thanks to a new bill that just passed in the Senate.

Embarrasment

The other day I mentioned in an earlier post in my blog about how Johnson lied to the American people to get us into the Vietnam War. Now, another government boo-boo is brought to light. Evidently, telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps because of unpaid phone bills.

Name Tasing

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (a/k/a ICANN) issued a report that recommends for further study the possibile ways to stop domain name tasting, a practice where somebody registers a lot of names and returns some to all of them in a few days after some test marketing with the names.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Tying up domain names is no more than real estate speculation and the reasons why you would want to prevent it already have laws against it (e.g., trademark violations). Furthermore, it's going to take forever for ICANN to act on this report, if ever.