Netflix was recently slapped with a class-action lawsuit from disgruntled investors who claim that the company withheld information before the company’s stock-price drop that happened over last summer and fall. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System, on behalf of all plaintiffs similarly situated.

In response to Rotem Guez launching LikeStore, a website that sells advertisers Facebook Likes for their Facebook pages, Facebook is suing him. LikeStore offers users free content for Liking a company’s page, which happens to be in violation of Facebook’s current Terms of Service, so Facebook decided it was time to shut the service down. Guez is unhappy, as one might expect, and claims that though LikeStore is indeed in violation of the current Terms of Service, many other companies offer the same service. So, Guez did what any rational person would do in response to a lawsuit from Facebook — he legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg hoping that the bad publicity of Facebook suing Mark Zuckerberg would deter their legal efforts.

Opening a new chapter in the series of lawsuits between Apple and just about everyone else in the consumer electronics industry, the German courts have awarded Motorola Mobility with an injunction that could prevent Apple from selling products within the country. This is a surprising turn for Apple’s fortunes, as the company had won a similar injunction against Samsung in August.

As is the case with most legal proceedings, the situation is far more complicated than it first appears.

There are a lot of people who will say that Walmart has some bad business practices, treats their employees and customers poorly, and puts small companies out of business. There are less that are willing to take them to task on it. There is only one who would do it over 2 cents and principle: Mary Bach of Pennsylvania. When she was charged an additional 2 cents on top the listed price for her Banquet “Brown ‘N Serve” sausages –something she claims has happened more than once — she decided to sue, won, and was awarded $180.

From the get-go, this case seems to have all the hallmarks of frivilous, “I’ll sue you and your dog!” litigation, but Bach claims there’s more to it and I’m inclined to believe her. This is not Bach’s first suit against Walmart. In fact, she’s sued five times in the past for exactly the same thing: Being charged more money than the listed price. While it’s only a few cents, given the freqeuncy of the event and the number of customers Walmart has daily, Back thinks this amounts to some serious unearned, dishonest revenue.

Voltage Pictures, the creators of Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, has dropped about 90% of the defendants in their lawsuit against those they claim illegally downloaded the hit film. The original suit listed 24,583 defendants, nearly all of which were as yet unidentified and listed only by IP address. Though 90% is a huge reduction in the scope of the lawsuit, it still lists over 2,300 individuals.

The dismissal seems to be connected with Voltage’s inability to identify most of the persons they believe downloaded their film. Of those roughly 2,300 still listed in the lawsuit, Voltage has yet to identify about 2,278. It seems some defendants have filed motions with their ISPs, preventing their names from being revealed and further hampering Voltage’s attempts to serve them as part of the suit. Voltage is now seeking additional time from the courts to identify those individuals.

As if this lawsuit didn’t have enough strange twists, it’s worth noting that those thousands of defendants were dismissed “without prejudice.” This means that charges could be brought against them at a later date.

(via Torrent Freak, VentureBeat)

In the ongoing struggle between Apple and Samsung over the Galaxy Tab tablet computer, Apple seems to have taken the lead for now. The Regional Court of Dusseldorf has sided with the iPad maker in granting a preliminary injunction over the sale and marketing of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in all European Union member states, save the Netherlands. This is the second injunction that Apple has won against the Tab, which was indefinitely blocked from launching in Australia.

The U.S. government has initiated a lawsuit against a former NASA astronaut to recover property used on the Apollo 14 moon mission. In question is a camera used during the 1971 mission that was brought to the attention of NASA after it was placed up for sale in a New York auction. Edgar Mitchell was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 and is the sixth man to have walked on the moon. He claims the camera is rightfully his, and is part of his personal collection of memorabilia.

The lawsuit was filed in Miami federal court and accuses Mitchell of illegally possessing the camera and attempting to sell it for profit. NASA reportedly learned the camera was in Mitchell’s possession after the British auction house Bonhams announced plans to sell the camera at a Space History Sale billed as one of the two cameras from Apollo 14′s lunar module Antares. The camera was expected to fetch between $60,000 and $80,000.

It’s sort of hard to be surprised when torrenting is the focus of a lawsuit, but this time it’s a little easier. The Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network is suing BitTorrent Inc. for patent infringement, of all things. While your typical torrenting lawsuits argue that BitTorrent and its software are accessories to copyright infringement, this lawsuit argues that BitTorrent is a patent infringement by its very nature.

It’s sort of hard to be surprised that torrenting is the focus of lawsuit, but this time it’s a little easier. The Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network is suing BitTorrent Inc. for patent infringement, of all things. While your typical torrenting lawsuits argue that BitTorrent and its software are accessories to copyright infringement, this lawsuit argues that BitTorrent is a patent infringement by its very nature.

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After Google announced Google Wallet yesterday, an NFC-based mobile payment system, PayPal sued Google and two of its executives for allegedly stealing trade secrets. The executives in question, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, led the launch of Google Wallet, but were formerly PayPal employees — Bedier having worked there for nine years and as vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures, and Tilenius having worked at eBay, PayPal’s parent company, for eight years, then continuing to work as a consultant to the company for a little under half a year after that.

PayPal is making some serious claims in their suit, accusing Bedier of having “misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers,” accusing Tilenius of recruiting Bedier, thus breaking a contractual agreement she had with eBay, and also accusing Bedier of attempting to poach former colleagues who were still working at PayPal. If that weren’t enough, eBay claims PayPal and Google were working together for three years to develop a deal where PayPal would act as a payment option for mobile app purchases made on Android devices, and eBay claims Bedier was the senior PayPal executive in charge of the Android negotiations with Google, and that Bedier also uploaded up-to-date documents outlining PayPal’s mobile payment strategies to a non-PayPal computer days before he left PayPal to work for Google.

The debate over whether The Huffington Post, newly enriched following its merger with AOL, should pay its unpaid bloggers has launched an armada of blog posts and a fleet of media roundtables, but today, the stakes will be upped. A group of bloggers has announced that it will file a class-action lawsuit against The Huffington Post, AOL, and Arianna Huffington, who personally pocketed at least $20 million from the $315 million merger.

The lead plaintiff in the suit is a man named Jonathan Tasini, who began blogging for The Huffington Post in December of 2005 and ceased blogging in February of this year, a few days after the merger was announced.

More details TK, but we can only assume that at stake here will be whether The Huffington Post or AOL violated any labor laws in their use of unpaid labor or misled the bloggers as to what they were ultimately entitled to.

Update: The complaint has been filed, and Tasini & co. are asking for a whopping $105 million.

TheHuffingtonPost.com’s continued assertion that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes has the broad detrimental effect of setting an artificially low price for the valuable digital content created by Plaintiff and the Classes, depressing the market for such content and, over the long term, having a serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content being created by Plaintiff and the Classes and on the ability of Plaintiff and the Classes to support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.

(via Mixed Media)