Lawsuits. It’s how large companies throw punches at each other. In the latest lawsuit news, LG has asked the International Trade Commission (ITC) to block the sale of PlayStation 3 consoles in the US due to a patent dispute.

According to LG, many of Sony’s BRAVIA TVs, Blu-ray players, and the PS3 itself infringes on four patents held by the Korean company. The complaints about the PS3 have to do with “a way of dealing with multiple data streams, such as different camera angles, as well as a system to reproduce data that’s stored on a read-only device.” If the ITC finds in LG’s favor, it does have the power to bar the PS3 from sale in the United States, though this is rarely enforced in such cases.

Late last year and this year a legal row has been going after several of the world’s largest manufacturers of LCD panels pled guilty to price fixing in the notebook market. Nokia has now filed suit against several of the same companies alleging price fixing in the LCD market for mobile phones.

Nokia has filed suit against Samsung Electronics Co., LG Display Co., Sharp Corp, Hitachi Displays Ltd., and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd and other firms. According to Nokia, it was hurt because the firms conspired to charge more for LCDs than the market would have normally supported.

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.

You might remember Anascape Ltd, the company that sued Microsoft and Nintendo back in 2006 for controller patent infringement. Well, they’re getting a huge payday of $21 million. A jury found that Nintendo’s Wii Classic, WaveBird, and Gamecube controller designs are all guilty of violating Anascape’s patents. Nintendo will of course appeal, probably telling the judge that nothing can touch them while they are using Mario’s “star power”.

Microsoft settled the case before the matter went to trial. Aside from this case, how many of you have ever heard of Anascape? Do they provide any products or services? Not really, aside from getting money for patents. They need a few Goombas sent their way.

Much like car manufacturer’s claims about MPG, you aren’t going to get all the hard drive space that’s advertised on your devices, but it’s an issue that may haunt Creative at the moment. A class-action suit was filed against the company regarding the quoted capacity of their hard-drive based media players. It could potentially result in a huge settlement for anybody who bought a device between May 5th 2001 and April 30th 2008. Of course, Creative isn’t admitting any wrong-doing.

The suit alleges that Creative knowingly misled users by promising 7-percent more capacity from their PMPs than was actually even possible, and that they exaggerated the number of songs and the total length of playback in hours. Nothing has hit court yet, but if customers can prove they bought a Creative hard-drive based player in the seven year period, will be eligible for either a 50-percent discount on the price of a new 1GB PMP, or 20-percent off a single item bought from Creative’s US online store.

You might have heard about the bizarre Guitar Hero lawsuit from Gibson against Activision. They’re claiming that Guitar Hero titles violate one of their patents. Now they have suddenly seemingly gone ballistic, suing everyone in site. Wal-Mart, Target, GameStop, Amazon, Toys ‘R’ Us and Kmart.

They want the game off the shelves. I guess they don’t like making money. Gibson says that it took “this action reluctantly, but is required to protect its intellectual property.” Retailers will only say “we aren’t commenting,”.