Thinking of working out some SPAM scheme to take advantage of users on social networking sites? After last week many would-be spammers may be thinking twice. On Friday the social networking site Facebook was awarded an $873 million fine for damages from an online spammer. This was the largest settlement awarded to date under the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.

A Canadian citizen named Adam Guerbuez with his company Atlantic Blue Capital used different types earlier this year to trick Facebook users into thinking they had messages from other Facebook “friends”. The messages were really from Guerbuez and his company and contained advertisement for sex enhancement drugs, illegal narcotics and sexual explicit materials.

A new patent application showed up recently on the USPTO website from Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry mobile devices. The application shows a slider phone with a hidden QWERTY keyboard behind and looks an awful lot like some mobile handsets we’ve seen recently from HTC.

The device is described by RIM as a Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard. I don’t think we’ve seen any devices from HTC that have a trackball which is somewhat of a trademark of RIM, but is that enough to make this a novel invention? We’re also wondering if this could be the new touchscreen BlackBerry that we’ve been hearing rumors about for quite some time now.

It looks like the boys in black and white at a Best Buy retail store D.C. have allegedly messed with the wrong woman. According to the timeline give by Raeyln Campbell, she brought a broken laptop to a Best Buy store to be repaired back in May of ‘07, which was stolen shortly after. As a result, Campbell is suing Best Buy for a total of over $54 million. Campbell knows full well that neither the laptop nor its contents are were worth quite $54 million, in fact the laptop was originally purchased for just $1110.35. What she wants, in her own words is “to bring attention to the reprehensible state of consumer property and privacy protection practices at America’s largest consumer electronics retailer”, and try to spare future consumers from the same fate she has experienced.

After corresponding in some manner with Best Buy for 5 months, the retail giant did offer her $900 gift card for the loss of the machine, but Campbell’s not buying. The lawsuit being filed is for $54,592,146.54 to be exact, which makes me think she must have some details behind this number, down to the penny.

Now this doesn’t mean that Apple has any real games in the works, but it does certainly look like Apple at least wants to keep the space open for themselves with regards to games using the Apple name. The folks over at Trademork.com caught wind of a filing made last week by Apple to the USPTO to protect the Apple name as it relates to gaming hardware, including hand-held units, video game machines, toys and battery powered computer games, among others.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see Apple head this way with some type of iGames, however. In case you hadn’t noticed, they seem to have made quite a hit with handheld media players, the iPod if I remember correctly, and a certain touch-screen mobile phone seemed to also gain quite a bit of attention lately.

Due to a new bill recently signed into law by Acting Gov. Richard Codey some New Jersey sex offenders are finding themselves completely banned from computers and cut off from the internet. Bill S1979 prohibits convicted sex offenders who used a computer to commit their crime from using computers or accessing the internet during at least part of their parole. It also gives the state the ability to restrict internet use to convicted sex offenders even if they did not use the internet to commit a sex offense.

The new law requires convicted individuals on parole to inform authorities of any devices they have access to which can access the internet, and authorities can make unannounced visits to homes of parolees to inspect computers and install monitoring devices.

Opera Software has filed a legal complaint to the European Commission against Microsoft over the companies web browser and how it is packaged with the operating system. As you may or may not have noticed, the Internet Explorer browser that comes with the Windows operating system has become part of the OS, and can’t really be removed or uninstalled. Because of this Opera Software is complaining that the tie Microsoft has between the OS and its IE browser is illegal since it does not give competing browsers a chance on the highly dominate Windows OS. Opera is also saying that Microsoft is hindering interoperability by not following the commonly accepted web standards.

Opera is asking that Microsoft be forced to “unbundle” their web browser and operating system allowing other browsers, such as Opera’s, to be able to compete more fairly. They are also asking that Microsoft adhere to common Web standards so that developers creating hosted applications and web sites do not allow or need specific code written for viewing on Internet Explorer compared to other browsers.

What do AT&T, Apple, Comcast, Cablevision and eBay all have in common? They are all being sued today by Klausner Technologies over visual voicemail patents the company says it owns and which it feels these well known, other companies have not yet requested a patent license for.

The suits were filed by the company which “was founded by Judah Klausner, the inventor of the PDA and electronic organizer.” Klausner Technologies says Cablevision’s Optimum Voicemail, Comcast’s Digital Voice Voicemail, eBay’s Skype Voicemail and AT&T/Apple’s iPhone Visual Voicemail services all violate patents it holds which allow “users to selectively retrieve and listen to voice messages via message inbox displays.”

The Romantics band filed a law suit against Activision, makers of the Guitar Hero game, on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Detroit ‘Rock City’ for a sound-alike recording of What I Like About You, originally recorded by the Romantics. The song in question was released in July as part of about 30 songs in total in the Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s game for the Sony Playstation. The Guitar Hero game involves players singing and trying to play a guitar along with the music in the game, and the Romantics are seeking an injunction that would take the game off of store shelves.

The issue that the band has with Activisions use of the song is not a copyright complaint as one might think. Activision did get permission in advance to record a cover version of the song What I Like About You, but the band is issuing the suit on the grounds that the song sounds just a little too much like the original band and infringes the band’s right to its own image and likeness.

Is “Halo 3″ not worthy of play on the Microsoft Xbox 360? According to one California resident, you better bet your Covenant plasma pistol.

A class action suit has been dropped on Bungie, the makers of “Halo 3″ and Microsoft alleging that their hit video game “does not function with the Xbox 360, and to the contrary, attempted use of Halo 3 consistently causes the Xbox 360 to ‘crash,’ ‘freeze,’ or ‘lock up’ while the game is being played.” The suit also states that neither one of the two firms have done enough to fix the problems caused by the bad loads. “Many consumers have reported that the ‘Halo 3′ video game has caused their Xbox video game consoles to crash and remain totally inoperable after playing the ‘Halo 3′ video game,” reads a portion of the document.

SanDisk on Thursday simultaneously filed 3 lawsuits against 25 different companies including LG for patent infringement on flash memory products. SanDisk is looking for unspecified damages and a permanent injunction and a permanent exclusion order that would keep these manufacturers from importing their products to the U.S.

The companies targeted in the lawsuit are mostly Asian and aside from LG Electronics also include popular names like Kingston Technology, Silicon Motion Technology, Apacer Technology, Imation Corp, Buffalo and PNY Technologies among others. The suit is for the technology that controls the communication between the memory and the device in which the memory is mounted on, such as flash memory cards, thumb drives and players based on flash memory.

The verdict is in on the first file-sharing case to go to a jury. The defendant, a 30-year-old single mother named Jammie Thomas, was found guilty of copyright infringement and damages totaling $222,000 were awarded to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the group representing the record companies. While Thomas’ attorney tried to convince the members of the jury that she was not the Kazaa user “Tereastarr” that was logged as downloading 22 songs from such bands as Aerosmith, Journey and Green Day in the end the 12 members found that there was sufficient evidence to incriminate Thomas since the computer she owned was used to download the songs in question. The verdict works out to a staggering $9,250 that Thomas now owes the RIAA for each song illegally downloaded.

After ongoing negotiations over an LCD patent license that started back in 2006, Sharp feels they are unable to come to a resolution with rival Samsung and yesterday filed a lawsuit against the company in a US district court. The lawsuit alleges that Samsung has infringed upon five of Sharps patents in LCD-related technology.

Sharp claims that Samsung is manufacturing and selling products in the US that infringe on LCD-related patents that Samsung owns including LCD TV’s and monitors that contain LCD modules made by Samsung and mobile phones that incorporate LCD screens made by Samsung. Sharp has many patents in the US and Japan related to LCD technology and licenses them out to different LCD panel manufacturers, which is likely what Sharp was trying to work out with Samsung.

In case you’d like to look up the relative …

Another patent from Apple was recently published through the USPTO showing a type of text-to-voice system entitled “Multimedia data transfer for a personal communication device”.

The patent describes a system for transferring data between mobile, personal communication devices such as phones, walkie talkies or maybe even iPhone nano’s. According to Macnn the system would lend itself nicely to those with visual impairments since it transfers text between devices and the receiving device could then read the text aloud through a speaker.

A notable difference between this system and and traditional texting data transfers is that this does not use a traditional protocol or intermediary server to handle the messaging. Instead it transfers the data directly between the devices through standard audio communication channels.

Source

Microsoft and the Xbox 360 are receiving their first lawsuit from a Florida lawyer claiming that the game console scratches and ruins the discs, making them unplayable. The suit claims that by moving the game console from a vertical to horizontal position, or from horizontal to vertical will cause the laser that reads the discs to cause permanent damage to the discs, and Microsoft does not specify to not move the console while in use. The official complaint filed Thursday states that the scratches can also happen when the console is not moved at all.

Jeffrey M. Ostrow, on behalf of his client Jorge Brouwer is asking Microsoft to correct the problem in the game console as well as cover the costs of the games that are ruined by the problem. In order to replace a …

With the rise of massive multiplayer online games (MMOs for short), players went off in search of gold, slaying monsters or waging war in virtual universes. Of course, their real world sins followed with them and soon you started to hear about players killing players in cold blood (spawn killing), making money through shady means (gold farming) or even throwing away their real-life marriages in favor of a new relationship they made online.

The world of “Second Life” is an MMO where people don’t quest for treasure or slay orcs but instead create an avatar and make items to sell or trade with other players. Now one of those players (who goes by the name Stroker Serpentine) has launched a real lawsuit against another player who he claims is copying and selling a virtual item that Stroker originally made – a …