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Major League Baseball has struck out in its attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede in a fantasy baseball dispute.

The justices on Monday said they won't take up MLB's challenge, backed by the National Football League Players Association, of prior court rulings favoring a fantasy league company. The announcement came without comment in a standard list of case statuses published by the high court (PDF).

MLB's Internet media arm, later joined by the pro-baseball players' union, had claimed that C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing--a Missouri company that sells fantasy sports products via the Web, e-mail, regular mail, and phone--was using baseball players' names and statistics without a license, thereby violating the players' rights to publicity under state intellectual property laws. (A right to publicity, of course, is a person's right to control and profit from the commercial use of his name and likeness.)

The original lawsuit actually came from C.B.C. The company sued MLB after the pro baseball association began providing fantasy baseball games on its own Web site. MLB offered C.B.C. a license only to promote MLB's products, not to continue selling its own fantasy baseball games. Fearing a lawsuit from MLB if it continued business as usual, C.B.C. filed its own suit.

C.B.C. won at the district court level and again last year at the appeals court level, which held that the company's "first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players' rights of publicity."

Google is willing to fight Viacom all the way to the Supreme Court in the companies' legal battle over YouTube and pirated videos, but Viacom is taking a hard line of its own, executives from the companies said Wednesday.

David Eun, Google's vice president of content partnerships, told Dow Jones Newswires that Google has no plan to resolve the Viacom case outside court. "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court," Eun said. "We're very clear about it."

Separately, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone told Dow Jones he's standing up for broader principles.

"When we filed our lawsuit, we not only served our own interests, we served the interests of everyone who owns copyrights that they want protected," said Redstone. "We cannot tolerate any form of piracy by anyone, including YouTube...they cannot get away with stealing our products."

Viacom sued Google for "massive intentional copyright infringement" in 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages.

At stake in the fight is a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the 1998 law that shields Web site owners from copyright infringement involving material published by users. The "safe harbor" provision in the law can protect against infringement claims as long as copyrighted material is removed upon notification.

After the suit, YouTube launched an antipiracy tool that checks uploaded videos against the original content in an effort to flag piracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in an appeal of a lawsuit accusing the National Security Agency of illicit spying on millions of Americans communicating with foreigners.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit in 2006 on behalf of journalists, scholars, criminal defense attorneys and Islamic-Americans, had sought review of a 2-1 decision last summer by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to throw out its case.

The ACLU obtained a victory at the trial court level in August 2006. A federal judge in Michigan ruled that the NSA's once-secret terrorist surveillance program, which operated without court orders, "ran roughshod" over Americans' constitutional rights Americans and violated federal wiretapping law.

But the Sixth Circuit overturned that ruling on narrow procedural grounds. It determined that the ACLU and the plaintiffs didn't have legal standing to bring the suit in the first place because they hadn't shown adequate evidence that they have been "personally" subject to the eavesdropping program. The judges did not, however, take a position whether the spying program itself was legal.

The Supreme Court's decision, which arrived without comment, lets that opinion stand.

"Although we are deeply disappointed with the Supreme Court's refusal to review this case, it is worth noting that today's action says nothing about the case's merits and does not suggest in any way an endorsement of the lower court's decision," said Steven Shapiro, the ACLU's legal director.

The Supreme Court's inaction does not, however, directly affect about 40 cases pending before a federal judge in the Ninth Circuit appeals court in San Francisco.

One of them is the high-profile suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, which is accused of opening up its network illegally to the NSA. That case and others like it have prompted a fierce fight in Congress over whether to immunize corporations who assisted government spies from such legal action.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to weigh a dispute that could affect how taxes show up on Americans' cell phone bills, dealing a setback to wireless companies.

The case at hand, which pitted Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA against state utility regulators, centers on whether states should be allowed to forbid wireless carriers from breaking out various state and local taxes as line-item fees on a customer's bill.

Sounds like a simple enough matter, but it has actually stirred up quite a fuss.

The wireless companies, naturally, maintain they should be able to establish a visible separation between the base prices of their services and the fees required by various regulators. States and localities have increasingly been passing laws prohibiting those line items expressly in order to "hide" arguably unpopular taxes and fees from consumers, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile said in their brief to the high court.

And because taxes and fees vary by locale, building them into the base price would make it impossible to advertise one price to all customers nationwide, they contended--and therefore make it harder for consumers to compare prices among wireless carriers.

But state utility regulators have countered that the wireless companies are missing the point: The fees and taxes they impose are generally meant to fall on the wireless carriers themselves, not on consumers. Wireless companies should simply raise their rates to reflect that distinction, they argue.

An example of one such law, according to the court filings, is in Indiana, which imposes a tax on the "gross receipts" of corporations in the state. Indiana passed a law insisting that wireless carriers not pass on the tax to their customers as line-item fees. They are, however, allowed to raise their base rates accordingly.

The Federal Communications Commission has already sided with the wireless carriers. It issued an order in 2005 that said states can't impose such restrictions, citing a chunk of federal communications law that says wireless carriers must disclose all "rates charged." But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit disagreed, saying there's nothing in that law to stop states from regulating how line item fees show up on wireless bills.

Without comment on Tuesday, the nation's highest court said it wouldn't hear an appeal by wireless carriers to overturn the appeals court decision. The U.S. Department of Justice had urged the high court not to take up the case because the appeals court had already sent the decision back to the FCC for further review. That means the fate of Americans' cell phone bills is now effectively back in the federal regulators' hands.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take on a case that accuses Microsoft and Best Buy of deliberately tricking customers into signing up for MSN Internet service and improperly charging them when a trial period expires.

Microsoft and Best Buy had asked the high court to review the matter after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opted in May to let a class action suit against the companies proceed. The Supreme Court's decision not to review the case, which arrived without comment, means the class action can theoretically move forward.

The case began in 2003, when a California man named James Odom sued the companies, accusing them of violating federal racketeering law through a $200 million marketing agreement (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to be precise), according to the appeals court opinion (PDF).

Odom said Microsoft had agreed to promote Best Buy's online store, and in return, Best Buy employees would distribute trial versions of Microsoft's MSN Internet access service with certain product purchases. Employees would scan those CDs at the point of sale, and when asked why, the employee would say it was for inventory control, Odom's suit alleged. In reality, the information would be sent to Microsoft to initiate a trial subscription period without the customer's permission, Odom alleged.

Thousands of customers have received such treatment, which amounts to violations of racketeering law, Odom alleged in his suit. Another woman who joined the suit said a Best Buy employee signed her up for the MSN trial service without her knowledge and alleged she was never refunded the MSN charges when her trial period expired. When some customers reached Microsoft representatives to dispute the charges, the company would direct them to contest the charges with their debit or credit card providers, Odom's suit alleged.

No affected customer had been "fully compensated" for his or her losses, including a full refund of the unauthorized charges, any finance charges that occurred, interest on the money during the time Microsoft held it, and payback for the "time, effort and expense" associated with canceling the accounts and seeking refunds, Odom alleged.

A similar class action suit is pending in Washington state court.

Microsoft and Best Buy have denied any wrongdoing. They received backing from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the prominent pro-business group, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief, urging the high court to reverse the Ninth Circuit's findings or risk damage to the U.S. economy.

A "garden variety marketing agreement" like the Microsoft-Best Buy one shouldn't be subject to RICO, the chamber said, and allowing the Ninth Circuit's "improper" interpretation to stand could undermine future business partnerships. There's potentially a lot of money at stake: RICO violations can lead to triple damages in civil cases.

"RICO was designed to deter organized crime, not to be used as a tool to force legitimate companies to pay treble damages," Robin Conrad, an executive vice president with the chamber, said in September. "Courts should prevent RICO from being turned into the litigation equivalent of a thermonuclear device."

Open government is a central tenet for democracy. After all, if it's your government then you have the right to know what your money is going toward. But what about the rights of public employees' personal privacy? As reported in today's SFGate , the California Supreme Court has ruled that "the public has the right to know the names of police officers and the salaries of local and state government employees."

... Read more

The legality of a Maine state law designed to prevent minors from buying cigarettes online is slated to get another look from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Right now, the 2003 law is on ice, after successful legal challenges from trade associations representing air and motor carriers in Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But the high court agreed on Monday to accept a petition from Maine State Attorney General G. Steven Rowe to review the earlier decisions.

Federal district and appeals courts in recent years have largely agreed that the state law conflicts with a federal law known as the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994. It dictates that states may not enact laws "related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier...with respect to the transportation of property."

Maine's law prohibits tobacco retailers from shipping their products directly to customers in the state unless they use carriers that deliver the package directly to the purchaser, require a signature from the purchaser, and check the recipient's ID if he or she is younger than 27 years old. Retailers face penalties if they use carriers that don't provide such services.

State officials, for their part, have insisted that the federal law is intended to preempt only economic-related laws, not those aimed at protecting the public welfare. Because Internet and telephone sales of tobacco have become a "serious problem," the appeals court's decision poses "far-reaching and devastating effects on the states' ability to exercise their historic health-related police powers," they wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court (PDF).

Besides, Maine has regulated the delivery of various substances, ranging from fireworks and explosives to liquor, drugs and handguns in the past, the petition said.

The Bush Administration had urged the Supreme Court in a brief not to accept the case, saying the appeals court was correct in finding that the federal law trumped Maine's state statute.

Ten leading investment banks that helped several hundred technology companies make initial public offerings during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s can't be sued for antitrust violations, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.

In a 7-1 decision (PDF) authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, the majority dismissed arguments made by 60 investors who filed a pair of class-action antitrust suits against the banks in January 2002.

The investors had claimed that the banks had behaved anticompetitively by imposing special conditions on top of the agreed-upon IPO share prices and commission. According to the high court opinion, those conditions included forcing the investors to agree to purchase additional shares later at higher prices, to pay "unusually high" commissions, or to buy "less-desirable" securities as well.

A federal district court initially dismissed the allegations against the banks, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The Supreme Court, for its part, reversed the appeals court finding.

Breyer wrote that the Securities and Exchange Commission already actively enforces forbidden conduct and that "to allow an antitrust lawsuit would threaten serious harm to the efficient functioning of the securities markets."

What does all of this mean for Wall Street? Read the full story on CNET News.com.

The Supreme Court said Monday that it won't hear an appeal from an Iowa phone company that claimed Qwest Communications International owed it money for wireless phone calls that Qwest connected to its network, the Associated Press reported.

The issue centered around whether telecommunications rates should be set by federal regulators or state regulators. Specifically, Qwest was transmitting wireless traffic over Iowa Network Services network en route to its final destination. Qwest believed lower rates set by Iowa state regulators should be used. And INS believed that rates set by the Federal Communications Commission, which happen to be higher than the state regulatory rates, should be used.

The lower courts sided with Qwest, saving the phone company tens of millions of dollars in charges it would have had to pay INS, the article said.

Iowa Networks has argued that the lower courts rulings weaken the federal government's role in setting rates. The company's lawyer even said that it could have ramifications for other federally regulated industries, such as electric and gas utilities and railroads.