legal

The International Herald Tribune reported on Thursday that Facebook attempted to acquire a look-alike German social network before finally suing it in a federal court last month.

StudiVZ, a German site geared toward college students, is 10 times the size of Facebook's user base in Germany. It also looks just like Facebook, with a different color scheme, which is what ticked off the site's legal team. The court complaint, which called StudiVZ "a knockoff," says "a year and a half after the debut of Facebook's Web site, (it) was built by copying the look, … Read more

The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a long-standing state law ruling that employers can't restrict employees from working for a competitor or soliciting former clients when they leave the company.

That may be good news for California-based tech employees who want to take their skills to another company, or head a start-up that may directly compete with their former employer. "Noncompete" contracts, in place largely to protect an employer's intellectual property, began being used by companies during the dot-com boom to prevent losing valuable workers in a competitive technology labor market.

Microsoft and Google battled … Read more

A federal court ruled Thursday that a lawsuit against the executives who sold social network MySpace to News Corp. can go forward, as Judge George King in the Central District of California rejected a motion to dismiss the case.

The case was brought forth by Brad Greenspan, who founded a digital-entertainment company called eUniverse in 1998. Greenspan served as CEO and chairman of the publicly traded eUniverse until late 2003, when he resigned amid financial woes that saw the company's stock delisted from the Nasdaq index.

While Greenspan was at the helm of eUniverse, he oversaw the creation of … Read more

A New York man known for stirring up controversy on YouTube was arrested Thursday by federal authorities after allegedly claiming he had instructed Gerber employees to lace baby food with cyanide.

Anton Dunn, a 42-year-old from Manhattan who goes by "Trashman" on YouTube, has a moderate following on the video site, but probably not for the right reasons. Earlier this year, some of the tabloid press picked up on a video he posted in which he claimed to have purposely infected more than 1,500 women with the AIDS virus. He has also claimed to have killed two … Read more

There's something funny about Facebook's handling of this week's Scrabulous affair.

One of the social network's most popular developer applications, as the Web well knows by now, was pulled by its creators after Scrabble parent company Hasbro filed a copyright and trademark infringement claim. The game returned several days later as Wordscraper, a redesigned and renamed game that's probably just different enough to keep Hasbro's lawyers away. And all the while, Facebook says that its only action was to forward Hasbro's complaint to the creators of Scrabulous.

What was so odd? Facebook'… Read more

In the high school cafeteria of Facebook apps, Scrabulous is like that girl who gets in trouble for showing too much skin, only to throw on a hoodie and be let back into the principal's good graces. Sort of. The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, a few original play options, a different points tabulation system, and a new name, Wordscraper.

Props to Adam Ostrow of Mashable for picking up on this one early.

The Facebook application Scrabulous had been taken down by its creators earlier this week when Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the … Read more

The saga continues: Electronic Arts, which handles digital versions of the board game Scrabble for North American parent company Hasbro, has claimed that malicious hackers were responsible for the disappearance of its Facebook application on Tuesday.

The game had crashed on the same day that the creators of Scrabulous, a popular imitation game, blocked access to North American visitors after a legal complaint from Hasbro. With the real Scrabble inaccessible, irritated fans assumed that there was a server problem--the game is in beta, after all--and filled the application's discussion wall with angry comments.

But the real problem, EA has … Read more

When Scrabulous, a popular game on Facebook's developer platform, was shut down earlier on Tuesday because of copyright infringement issues with the manufacturer of the Scrabble board game, word game fans weren't totally left in the dark. After all, Electronic Arts (which handles the digital rights to Scrabble for the game's parent company, Hasbro) had recently created an official beta version of Scrabble for the platform.

Problem is, the servers that were hosting the "real" Scrabble app couldn't handle the load of new migrants, and the application crashed on Tuesday afternoon. Oops!

"We'… Read more

Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada can no longer access Scrabulous, the faux-Scrabble game that quickly became one of the most popular applications on its developer platform.

This was done independently on behalf of the Scrabulous creators, a Facebook representative told CNET News in an e-mail Tuesday. "In response to a legal request from Hasbro, the copyright and trademark holder for Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, the developers of Scrabulous have suspended their application in the U.S. and Canada until further notice," the e-mail explained.

The game's disappearance comes in the wake … Read more