Public Knowledge filed a joint brief on behalf of Google's case against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood because “Section 230 is a critical part of letting us all communicate online,” said a PK spokeswoman Monday. Without that part of the Communications Act, it's “very easy for overbroad liability and procedural fishing expeditions to shut down intermediaries necessary for communication and encourage them to restrict and restrain their customers' communications even more,” she said. “We've criticized Google's restrictions of customer communications in the past -- restrictions put in place due to pressures applied in the absence of protections like section 230.” That responded to accusations by David Lowery, a music business lecturer at the University of Georgia and a songwriter, that PK is among many advocacy groups serving the exclusive interests of Google (see 1502020047).

Lawyers for all sides involved in two Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) lawsuits against the major carmakers have until Thursday to show cause in writing why the two cases shouldn’t be consolidated into one, said an order by U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, in Washington, D.C. Ford and General Motors and their respective suppliers Clarion and Denso violated the AHRA because they shipped vehicles with CD-copying hard drives without building the Serial Copy Management System into the devices or paying the Copyright Office the required 2 percent hardware royalty on the wholesale price of the hardware, alleged the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies in a July 25 lawsuit (see 1408010063). The alliance filed a second lawsuit mid-November on the same grounds against Chrysler and its supplier Mitsubishi. The defendants in both cases have sought to have the complaints thrown out. Lawyers for Chrysler and Mitsubishi urged the judges in the two cases in a Dec. 12 letter to consolidate the cases because they “involve common issues of fact and common questions of law.” Combining the cases will “enhance efficiency” and “avoid the possibility of inconsistent decisions in applying a rarely used statute to products that did not exist and were not specifically contemplated by Congress at the time of enactment more than 22 years ago,” the letter said of the AHRA.

Fox Networks emphasized that the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled (see 1501210056) that Dish Network breached its contract with Fox Networks with its Sling and Hopper Transfers features. Fox said in a statement Tuesday that Dish also was found to have infringed Fox’s copyrights and breached its contract by making unauthorized copies of Fox programming with its AutoHop feature, which lets customers skip commercials on programming they record. “While we are still disappointed the court felt that PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop do not violate our copyrights or contract, Dish has been largely disabling AutoHop anyway,” said Fox. This case doesn’t involve consumer rights or new technology, but “protecting creative works from being exploited without permission,” Fox said. Dish didn’t have an immediate comment.

MPAA sued Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technology (Xunlei), a Chinese peer-to-peer file-sharing site, MPAA said in a news release Tuesday. It said the lawsuit, which seeks damages and a public apology for Xunlei’s alleged copyright infringement, was filed Monday in the Nanshan District Court in Shenzhen, China. “A healthy, sustainable and developing online video sector will greatly benefit audiences and movie and technology businesses, however this outcome is only possible if quality film and television content is respected and protected at every stage of the value chain,” said President Mike Ellis of Motion Picture Association-Asia Pacific, which represents MPAA in the region. “For too long we have witnessed valuable creative content being taken and monetized without the permission of the copyright owner,” he said in the release. “That has to stop and stop now.” The U.S. Trade Representative cited Xunlei as a threat to intellectual property in USTR's notorious markets list in 2012 (see 1212170079). Xunlei couldn’t be reached for comment.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland denied chipmaker Diablo Technologies' motion for a stay of her preliminary injunction that bars the company from distributing or selling high-speed memory controller chipsets to SanDisk for its ULLtraDIMM solid-state drive product line, in an order Tuesday. Supplier Netlist, which sued Diablo in August 2013 alleging breach of contract, trade secret misappropriations and other charges, won the injunction on Monday (see 1501130036). Rogers did deny Netlist’s motion for an order recalling all ULLtraDIMM modules that already have shipped, saying Netlist “has not met the higher burden associated with a mandatory injunction requiring a recall.” The case is to go to trial in early March. Netlist in a statement Thursday hailed Rogers’ refusal to stay the injunction. “Endless legal maneuvering does nothing to change the facts that led to the ordering of the preliminary injunction in the first place,” Netlist said. “Namely, Netlist’s claims that Diablo breached the contract, stole Netlist's trade secrets and incorporated them in SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM. We look forward to securing damages and a permanent injunction on the products in the upcoming trial.” Representatives for Diablo and SanDisk didn’t comment.

Chipmaker Diablo Technologies immediately moved for a stay Monday in a federal judge’s preliminary injunction that bars the company from distributing or selling high-speed memory controller chipsets to SanDisk for its ULLtraDIMM solid-state drive product line. Supplier Netlist, which sued Diablo in August 2013 alleging breach of contract, trade secret misappropriations and other charges, won the injunction. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland granted the preliminary junction, in an order Monday. She denied Netlist’s motion for an order recalling all ULLtraDIMM modules that already have shipped, saying Netlist “has not met the higher burden associated with a mandatory injunction requiring a recall.” Diablo representatives didn’t comment. Diablo attorneys' motion for a stay, also filed Monday, said they plan to “challenge on appeal substantial questions of law which control the outcome of this matter.” For example, Diablo argued, Netlist waited 13 months after suing Diablo to move for a preliminary injunction, and that delay alone is at odds with Netlist claims that harms to the company would be imminent and irreparable without an injunction. “Netlist has not shown that its alleged harms hamper it from conducting its business,” Diablo said. “By contrast, issuance of the preliminary injunction against Diablo will be severe and irreparable.” Netlist trumpeted the granting of the injunction in a news release Tuesday that hailed the judge for her “extraordinary legal ruling,” saying the decision “is a validation of what we've said from the beginning about Diablo's flagrant actions.” Netlist has maintained in its complaint that it created and patented the “ground-breaking memory interface technology” at issue in the case. Netlist signed a supply agreement in which it “contracted with Diablo to implement a proprietary memory-controller chipset based on this technology, only to find that Diablo stole its trade secrets and incorporated them into Diablo's own products,” it said. SanDisk representatives didn’t comment.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers’ office reached a $2 million settlement with Dish Network Friday, focusing on the company’s sales practices. The company will revise its sales disclosures nationwide to reflect its right to raise prices at any time, said the office in a news release. "This is going to have broader implications regarding the disclosure and consumer protection rights that we were able to establish through the agreement by the company to be a lot more forthcoming in its sales practices," said a spokeswoman for the office in an interview Monday. The AG began investigating Dish’s sales practices in 2011. Numerous consumers complained about price increases after the company promised that contract rates were “frozen” or “guaranteed” not to change. While disagreeing with the AG's allegations, Dish said it appreciates the office's "constructive feedback regarding our sales process," emailed a company spokeswoman. "We are pleased to amicably resolve this matter." The settlement was filed in Denver District Court by attorneys with the AG's Consumer Protection Section, as was a civil complaint alleging Dish's sales practices violated the Colorado Consumer Protection Act. The money will be split by the state's general fund and a special consumer protection fund in Suthers' office.

Apple’s allotment of onboard storage for consumer use on mobile devices is under fire in a class-action lawsuit brought in Northern California District Court in San Jose over what plaintiffs Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, of Miami, call “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” about iOS 8. The complaint charges Apple with failing to disclose to consumers that as much as 23.1 percent of the advertised storage capacity of 8 and 16 GB iPhones, iPads and iPods will be consumed by iOS 8 and “unavailable for consumers” who buy the devices with iOS 8 installed. The suit cites the “marked discrepancy” between the devices' advertised capacity and available capacity, as the OS and other storage space unavailable to consumers consume "an extraordinary percentage” of the devices’ “limited storage capacity.” The complaint also says harm to consumers is compounded by the way Apple “aggressively markets” the fee-based iCloud storage system using “sharp business tactics” that involve offering to sell cloud capacity “in a desperate moment” such as when a consumer is trying to record an important event. “Each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs,” lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain. The suit says Apple’s advertisements of capacity are “deceptive and misleading” because they omit facts a consumer might consider when evaluating a product for purchase, including that as much as 3.7 GB of a 16 GB device is not available to the buyer for content storage. More than 20 percent of an iPhone 6+ with iOS 8 pre-installed is not available for consumer file storage, the suit says. The claimants also charge “misrepresentations” to device owners with predecessor operating systems who aren’t told that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a device 600 MB to 1.3 GB of storage space, “a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.” An Apple spokeswoman told us the company had no comment on the lawsuit. She referred us to the Apple website where the company offers iOS users 5 GB of iCloud storage for free and noted that the total user storage available to users -- on a device plus free iCloud storage -- exceeds the amount of storage the claimants said was unavailable to users.

Online news publication Re/code should destroy, not publish, any information it might have related to the Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach, said Sony lawyer David Boies, chairman of law firm Boies, Schiller, in a letter Sunday. Boies said SPE would hold Re/code responsible for “damages or loss” stemming from the publication of the breached data. Rep. Marsha Blackburn said earlier this month that the SPE breach is another reason to pass her Secure It Act (HR-1468) (see 1412080061).

The Supreme Court reversed a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision and unanimously ruled that warehouse workers filling orders for Amazon don’t have to be paid for time spent going through security checks. Integrity Staffing v. Busk stemmed from a lawsuit brought by workers employed by Integrity Staffing Solutions, who claimed they were entitled to compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for the time spent waiting to undergo and to go through security screenings. But “an activity is integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform ... if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday in the court opinion. Because the employees’ time spent waiting to undergo, as well as undergoing, Integrity Staffing’s security screenings doesn’t meet these criteria, the appeals decision was reversed, he said. That time isn’t compensable under the FLSA, he said. The 9th Circuit asserted that post-shift activities that ordinarily would be classified as “non-compensable postliminary activities are nevertheless compensable as integral and indispensable to an employee’s principal activities if those postshift activities are necessary to the principal work performed and done for the benefit of the employer.” That court erred by focusing on whether an employer required a particular activity, Thomas said. That an employer could conceivably reduce the time spent by employees on any preliminary or postliminary activity doesn’t change the nature of the activity “or its relationship to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform,” he said. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan submitted a joint concurring statement. The allegations in this case "were simply not true," an Amazon spokeswoman said. Data show that employees typically walk through security with little or no wait, "and Amazon has a global process that is designed to ensure the time employees spend waiting in security is less than 90 seconds," she said.