Anyone who has gotten any volume of email from corporate sources has probably encountered a range of severe and important-sounding disclaimers in email signatures, ranging from those that tell the reader not to act on the email if it was received in error to those saying that its contents are off the record to those saying that the email is not legal or professional advice.

A British government website provides the following template, some variation of which you may well have come across: “This email and any attachments to it may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of [business name]. If you are not the intended recipient of this email, you must neither take any action based upon its contents, nor copy or show it to anyone. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error.”

Obviously, this sort of disclaimer is meant to impose an agreement or understanding upon the reader, and it may well be successful in this by virtue of looking so official. But how much legal meaning does it have, really? Generally, not much.

Thirteen record companies are suing LimeWire LLC, makers of the file-sharing program LimeWire, for as many as $75 trillion, a hilarious sum of money that quite possibly doesn’t even exist. When the companies won a ruling against Lime Wire last May, they requested damages that could now end up totaling the aforementioned ridiculous amount, which is five times our national debt.

The plaintiffs requested damages from $400 billion to $75 trillion and argued that Section 504(c)(1) of the Copyright Act “provided for damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable,” which could explain how the total could somehow rise to the $75 trillion, because each “instance of infringement” could technically be counted as each and every separate download.

Earlier this week Verizon and MetroPCS filed suits contesting the FCC’s new net neutrality statues, the ones that aren’t even as firm as most internet users would hope.

The FCC is now requesting that the DC appeals court in which the suits were filed throw them out, on some solid but incredibly procedural grounds.

In as nutty a nutshell as we can get, people aren’t allowed to sue part of the government in front of the DC circuit court before the thing that they are suing about is published in the Federal Register by that part of the government.  The FCC’s new rules have only been announced. Verizon countered by saying that since the new laws would affect their licenses, the suits fall under a law about licensing, which says that you can sue as soon as the law is announced.

But it doesn’t stop there.

California Senate Bill 1411 went into effect yesterday, adding criminal and civil penalties to the act of impersonating a person online.  Specifically,

to knowingly and without consent credibly impersonate another person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud another person.

Sounds great for identity theft.  But, as TechCrunch points out, the bill does not address satiric or parodic impersonations a la Fake Steve Jobs.

Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports (in translation, original here) that the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees has passed two resolutions on internet video and internet radio respectively, that classify YouTube, Vimeo and other sites whose content is entirely user generated as television stations.

The reasoning is that if a site in any way curates their user generated content, even with automatic algorithms, “this amounts to editorial control,” and the site should be held to the same rules that apply to Italy’s broadcast television stations.  This would subject these sites to a small tax, would require them to take down videos within 48 hours of the request of anyone who feels they have been slandered, and to not broadcast videos unsuitable for children at certain times of day (whatever that would actually mean for a completely online service).

Most importantly, however, the new resolutions would make YouTube and other sites legally responsible for all of their content.

In a decision ruled only yesterday, the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has stated that e-mail should be treated like other private forms of communication when it comes to search and seizure. That is, the authorities have no more right to ask an internet service provider to turn over your e-mail records than they do to ask the post office to give them your physical mail, ask a phone service provider to tap your phones, or to enter your house without permission. In every case, they’ve got to get a warrant.

From the decision:

It only stands to reason that, if government agents compel an ISP to surrender the contents of a subscriber’s emails, those agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search, which necessitates compliance with the warrant requirement.

Did you know that Zynga, makers of Farmville, sued Disney Entertainment more than a year ago? You see, Disney had just acquired one of Zynga’s competitors Playdom. Playdom, according to Zynga, had been poaching ex-Zynga employees and had even gotten a hold of Zynga’s “playbook,” a guide to the company’s – ahem – “secret sauce.”

We often wonder, incredulously, when the internet will reach a limit on talking about superhero porn parody movies. Not that we think the production of such things should stop or that they’re not worth reporting on, we simply went through a period where we felt awash in a vast and unruly sea of Batman XXX: A Porn Parody information.

When does the idea of superhero porn parodies reach a point where we feel the need to report on them? What other facet of our news mandate does it have to intersect with for us to want to tell you about it?

File sharing and copyright issues, as it turns out.

Rush Limbaugh is a well-known American conservative firebrand whose career controversies include implying that Michael J. Fox exaggerates his Parkinson’s symptoms (accompanied by illustrative jerky body language) and that supporters of Barack Obama are simply responding to a racist cultural trope; but who espouses a political ideology of small government, individual liberty and capitalism that resonates with many Americans.

And so, in the interest of fairness, reasonableness, and yes, sanity, we will mention that we are on the same side when it comes to government regulation of the sale of video games, specifically in Schwarzenegger vs. The Entertainment Merchants Association, which begins Supreme Court hearings on Tuesday.

After banning 5,000 players for using hacks, mods, and other tricks that are against the StarCraft II terms of use, Blizzard is now suing three of the people who created and distributed those hacks, mods, and tricks in the first place.

The game maker filed suit last week in a Los Angelos court against three programmers going by the handles Permaphrost, Cranix (both Canadians), and Linuxawesome (from Peru). Their suit alleges that:

Just days after the release of Starcraft II, Defendants already had developed, marketed, and distributed to the public a variety of hacks and cheats designed to modify (and in fact destroy) the Starcraft II online game experience. In fact, on the very day that Starcraft II was released, representatives of the hacks Web site advised members of the public that “our staff is already planning new releases for this game.”