lawsuit

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If you’re going to attend the Mile High Music Festival this weekend in Denver, don’t even think about bootlegging the music. Merely considering the notion means you’ve already been sued by event producer AEG Live. The company has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against “John Does 1-100, Jane Does 1-100, and XYZ Company” for illegal bootlegging… which hasn’t even been committed yet. Since nobody exists (yet) to contest the lawsuit, it moves ahead in court. It also means that AEG Live can get “law enforcement involved by using the lawsuit to ask the court to order US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers to go ahead and seize and impound the bootlegged material.”

Techdirt has more about this legally ridiculous situation, including the full text of the filed lawsuit.

(How soon will it be before we start seeing companies like Viacom using this sort of tactic ...

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About three years ago, this blog’s eclectic proprietor had to learn awful fast and hard about Viacom and its dispute with YouTube. If you recall, if you worked it out in your head then logically Viacom was accusing me of violating my own copyright after Viacom took my work without permission and used it for a show on VH1, and then accused ME of copyright infringement for posting the clip of that onto YouTube.

Well, I won that case as best I can imagine an individual could take on such a huge corporation and eke out a victory (again, thanks in no small measure to the good people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation). And I’ve been keeping an eye on Viacom ever since. One of the things that has galled me most is how Viacom and its mega-hypocrite of a CEO Sumner Redstone have shown such disdain toward ...

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This is gonna be a helluva fun thing to watch. I’m getting the popcorn ready even now…

Media conglomermonster Viacom – which has tied up the video hosting service in litigation for the past three years over “copyright infringement” – is now said to have been secretly uploading its own videos to the Google-owned website!

From the statement on the official YouTube blog, pertaining to court documents made public earlier today…

Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its

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I’ve been so busy with other things, I didn’t catch at all that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is suing the webmaster of a popular website based on her books. For the past several years Steven Vander Ark has run The Harry Potter Lexicon, an “online encyclopedia” of sorts devoted to the Harry Potter novels. Which otherwise wouldn’t be a problem: for fans to pay homage to such an acclaimed property is something the Internet has long been used to.

Except that Vander Ark has been set to publish – as in “printed volumes” – his website as a hard-copy edition to sell for personal profit.

Big no-no there, Steve. And you and your publishing company should have known better.

So now Rowling is suing Vander Ark and RDR Books for copyright infringement. I don’t blame her. Vader Ark’s website is a nice, succinct resource for Harry Potter facts. ...

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The more I think about how disgraced school board member/admitted sign stealer Ron Price’s lawsuit against the Moores ended (click here for more info, including links to the sworn depositions that the Moores, Price, and Yours Truly gave), the more I’m feeling honked-off to no end about it.

The man is certainly living up to his county-wide nickname of “Ron the Con” (one that I have heard bandied about everywhere from church to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Eden). Ladies and gentlemen, I posit that the whole sordid drama of this past year has been a massive charade perpetrated by Price and his attorney Douglas Hux. Because this lawsuit had nothing to do with seeking damages for legitimate libel. But it did have everything to do with an elected official using the law to intimidate and silence those who disagree with him.

Does anyone believe that Ron Price would ...

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See that pic of Ron Price? That’s when he was sworn in on the Rockingham County Board of Education a little over a year ago. Nobody from his family wanted to come and hold the Bible for him, so school board attorney Jill Wilson had to fill in. This pic was taken by Richard Moore, and we’ll get back to it in just a little bit…

A few days ago Ron Price dropped his lawsuit against Richard and Debbie Moore. There’s a story about it in The Reidsville Review, but based on what I’ve heard from a number of sources, the Review story is… shall we put it… “wildly inaccurate”. There was no settlement at all, and certainly no conditions imposed. Ron Price cried “Uncle!” on his own.

Yet in spite of giving up, Price is delusional enough to claim a victory out of this…

Price said he

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Ron Price (full name Ronald Filer Price), disgraced at-large member of the Rockingham County Board of Education and confessed campaign sign thief, couldn’t go the distance with his lawsuit against Richard and Debbie Moore, so he’s thrown in the towel.

Price and his attorney Douglas Hux dropped the lawsuit yesterday. You can click on the graphic on the right to see the dismissal. It was done “with prejudice” and voluntarily… meaning that Price can’t bring this same lawsuit up again.

There was no settlement. Price simply gave up.


(much bigger version of “Sir Ronald” graphic here)

Ron Price was suing the Moores for trying to hold Price accountable for his stealing campaign signs on the night before the 2006 general election. Among other things Price describes in his lawsuit how Richard Moore wore a t-shirt that said “If this shirt is missing look in Ron Price’s trunk” ...

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I wouldn’t mind saying out loud, even though I’ve now given on-the-record testimony during deposition, that Ron Price’s lawsuit against Richard and Debbie Moore is a steaming pile of horse manure. Except that doing so would be a dire insult to horses everywhere.

(Here is my own report about being deposed and here is Richard’s account, which includes not only my own time on the “witness stand” but his own and that of Debbie and Ron Price… who I especially heard did not do so well.)

In my admittedly non-legally trained estimation, this case is going to be laughed out of court. But that won’t be before Price and his attorney Doug Hux will have (a) wasted a lot of our valuable time and money, (b) wasted a lot of the public’s valuable time and money, and (c) continued to set a horrible example to this county’s young ...

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Here’s Richard Moore’s write-up about what happened during deposition in the Ron Price lawsuit against Richard and his wife Debbie. There are two big reasons why I’m posting it here too: one, because Richard gives his perspective on what happened when Doug Hux interrogated me. And two, because Richard Moore, although he’s not the lousy blogger like Ron Price is, is a man who just can’t leave stuff consistent on his Political Soup website. Richard, haven’t you heard of archiving stuff?! Anyhoo here it is for permanent record (and with proper citation, which I always do anyway)…

THE INCOMPLETE BUT ENTIRELY FACTUAL
ACCOUNT OF THE RON PRICE LAWSUIT DEPOSITIONS

D-DAY NOVEMBER 15, 2007. It wasn’t exactly the allies storming the beach at Normandy, but it was a bloody, painful assault on one witness. I am talking about Deposition Day in the Ron Price defamation lawsuit against my wife ...

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So yesterday afternoon – and a half-hour earlier than I had earlier been summoned to appear – I appeared for deposition in the lawsuit that Ron Price has filed against Richard and Debbie Moore.

What can I say about it? I’ll hold off on too much about it right now but I will say this: the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

It was mostly about Price’s attorney Doug Hux showing me a photo from last year’s Reidsville Christmas Parade (?!?!?). Hux asked me if I recognized it and I was like “Uhhh well DUH ‘cuz THOSE ARE MY PICTURES that WGSR is using in their commercial for this year’s Reidsville Christmas parade so OF COURSE I was right there!” Those weren’t my exact words but you get the idea. Anyhoo, Hux showed me a photo that’s very much like this one that I ...

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