Groklaw NewsPicks

So, Bloomberg has some quotes form the judge itself and from Samsung, and it's all incredibly peculiar. While the judge in the Dutch court case - which covers the exact same community designs - ruled that not only did Samsung not infringe on Apple's community designs, the community designs were most likely invalid due to being common sense (i.e., it's virtually impossible to make a tablet in a different way) and because of loads of prior art. The Dutch judge ruled the community design probably wouldn't survive a full court case.

The German judge's ruling, however, is the exact opposite, stating that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 bears a "clear impression of similarity" with the iPad 2. "The court is of the opinion that Apple's minimalistic design isn't the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible," the court states.

Account suspended! The name "Superman" does not comply with the Google+ Names Policy. Your profile will be suspended until you edit your name to be your real name. - Joy of Tech, on AllThingsD

Spero thus severed 187 defendants from the case; he noted that this approach has become common among California federal judges, making the Golden State an unpromising place to pursue P2P litigation en masse. Suing people remains an option, but one that has to be exercised on a case-by-case basis with all the filing fees and massive increase in paperwork that this entails. - Nate Anderson, ars technica

In Capitol Records v. MP3Tunes, Inc., District Judge William H. Pauley has ruled that the digital music locker business of MP3Tunes is protected from copyright infringement claims by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. August 22, 2011, decision [PDF], partially granting, and partially denying, summary judgment motions - Ray Beckerman, Recording Industry v. The People

Many Linux/Unix programmers are not aware that a battle over Bash scripts is currently raging in a Kansas courtroom. A Linux cluster vendor, Atipa Technologies is claiming all the Bash scripts they shipped to customers contain trade secrets and were stolen by former employees. Should this issue be decided in Atipa's favor, the fundamental idea of shared and open software could be blanketed by the simple claim of trade secrets....

Stouder also mentioned that he had a lawyer in the beginning, but is currently defending himself and trying to educate the legal system on the concept of open source and sharing. Sadly, McGaugh, a much respected and liked contributor to the HPC community took his own life in in December of 2004.

The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O'Connor, one of the department's online and gang gurus, has been put in charge of the new juvenile justice unit. He and his staff will mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem, sources said. - NY Daily News

I'm excited to report that I'm joining Xamarin as co-founder and CEO this week. I'm honored to be joining Miguel, Joseph and an all-star engineering team. And I am very passionate about our mission: to make mobile software development incredibly fast and easy. - Nat Friedman

Attachmate is one of Seattle's oldest software companies, with a history stretching back to the early 1980s. But did you know that it operates under the name of Wizard Parent LLC? We didn't, and now that entity has appeared in a recent SEC filing as having raised $377 million.

Why? A spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Wizard Parent owns The Attachmate Group, but she declined to offer details about the financing.

It appears that the money is tied to Attachmate's acquisition of Novell....We're still not sure how the $377 million comes into play, whether it's part of the overall offer or not.

Photographer Anton Jankovoy spent months camping at the foot of the world's highest peak patiently waiting for the right weather conditions.

The 23-year-old was so determined not to leave until he had accomplished his mission that he even began meditating to overcome the freezing temperatures. After three years dedicated to the project, Mr Jankovoy finally caught a series of stunning star trails. - The Daily Mail

You know it's tough out there for a P2P lawyer when even some random, anonymous, non-lawyer defendant is the more convincing party. That strange scenario unfolded yesterday in Illinois, where divorce-attorney-turned-porn-copyright-lawyer John Steele had his entire case against 300 defendants thrown out completely....

The judge let the case creak along for another two weeks, until one of the anonymous defendants in the case wrote in with an amateur "motion to quash" Steele's subpoenas. The judge immediately used that amateur motion as the ground for a total dismissal of the case, saying that it reminded him of why "the court was correct the first time around." - Nate Anderson, ars technica