Nota Bene

MarketWatch.com reports:

Cisco Systems Inc. and one of its employees are being sued by Texas attorneys claiming the employee anonymously defamed them on a Web site critical of so-called “patent trolls” that sue technology companies over intellectual property rights.

The Cisco employee, attorney Richard Frenkel, had been writing anonymously on the “Patent Troll Tracker” Web site. According to court documents, in October, Frenkel wrote that Texas attorney Eric Albritton “conspired” with the clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas to alter official documents in a proceeding involving Cisco.

In a civil suit filed in a Texas court Friday, Albritton claims that by doing so, Frenkel “acted with specific intent to injure” Albritton’s reputation and professional standing. Albritton is seeking unspecified damages.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

For more than 30 years, the District of Columbia has had the nation’s strictest gun-control law — a ban on having handguns at home for self-defense.On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that law from those who say it violates the 2nd Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms.

Few would cite D.C.’s gun ban as proof that gun control leads to crime control, as Washington continues to have one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime. Even some gun-control advocates don’t support it.

The case has drawn wide attention not because of the district’s law itself, but because the court may decide for the first time whether gun rights are truly protected by the Constitution, like the right to free speech and the right to freely practice one’s religion.

If so, it could mark the beginning of new era in which judges around the country are called upon to decide whether the many restrictions and regulations of weapons infringe the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment.

“Whenever there is an individual right [protected by the Constitution], the burden is on the government to justify a limit on that right,” said Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer at the Cato Institute.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Activision Inc. has sued Gibson Guitar Corp., saying its popular video game “Guitar Hero” doesn’t infringe on a Gibson patent.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, asks the court to declare the video game doesn’t infringe on the Nashville, Tenn., musical instrument maker’s patent for a “system and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience” and that Gibson’s patent is invalid.

“Despite being aware of the Guitar Hero game for many years, Gibson has encouraged Activision to manufacture and sell devices it now alleges infringe” the patent, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that Gibson notified Activision in January that it believed the “Guitar Hero” software and its guitar-shaped controller were covered by Gibson’s patent. Gibson asked that Activision obtain a license from the instrument maker under the patent or stop sales of the game, according to the lawsuit.

Time Magazine reports:

The parents of some 200,000 home-schooled kids in California were stunned last week when they learned that a judge had declared home schooling illegal unless conducted by a licensed teacher. For the moment, though, those parents can breathe a sigh of relief. Yesterday, Jack O’Connell, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, released a statement saying that the California Department of Education will not go after parents who do not have teaching credentials: “I have reviewed this case, and I want to assure parents that chose to home school that California Department of Education policy will not change in any way as a result of this ruling,” O’Connell said in his statement. “Parents still have the right to home school in our state.”

The BBC news reports:

Italy’s highest court has ruled that a woman wearing jeans cannot be raped.

The Supreme Court of Appeal in Rome on Wednesday overturned a rape conviction, saying that the supposed victim must have agreed to sex because her jeans could not have been removed without her consent.

The North County Times reports:

Saying that comments posted on a local blog have defamed him, a Murrieta man filed a civil lawsuit Thursday in what his attorney calls “a novel legal issue.”

Roy Holmgren claims in his lawsuit that statements made about him on murrietaopinion.blogspot.com have exposed him to “hatred, ridicule, contempt and disgrace.”

Holmgren is suing the operator of the blog as well as those who have posted the comments about him.

But, so far, neither he nor his attorney, Richard Ackerman, know who specifically they are suing.

“… the defendants hide behind the veil of the Internet to cover up their nefarious and tortious activities,” the lawsuit states.

Ackerman said Thursday that he has tried to find out who runs the blog from the host of the site, blogspot.com, but they have yet to cooperate.

“Whoever they are, they don’t have the right to publish defamatory material,” Ackerman said.

The lawsuit lists what it calls “false statements or general assertions” about Holmgren made on the blog.

According to the suit, bloggers said he was a stalker, that he is married to an illegal alien, that he has committed crimes that destroyed property, illegally gained credit report information, vandalized a blogger’s sport utility vehicle, and that he begs for money on the side of the road.

One blogger called Holmgren “a danger to this community” and wrote that he has mental and emotional problems he can’t control, according to the lawsuit.

The California Rules of Court were recently updated to allow for electronic service of briefs in PDF format in lieu of mailing four hard copies to the California Supreme Court. (See Rule 8.212).  Until recently, there was no way to implement this rule. However, the California Supreme Court has now set up a page for submitting PDF files in lieu of four hard copies. See the details here. The technical requirements for submitting the brief seem to be pretty basic:

Brief must be a single, text-searchable PDF file, no more than 5 MB in size, and an exact duplicate of the paper copy. Please do not submit scanned documents or any other documents associated with the case such as exhibits, applications, etc.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.

“At first, there was a sense of, ‘No way,’ ” said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County) who is active with a homeschool association. “Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation.”

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.

The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.

Some homeschoolers are affiliated with private or charter schools, like the Longs, but others fly under the radar completely. Many homeschooling families avoid truancy laws by registering with the state as a private school and then enroll only their own children.

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California’s compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child’s grade level.

You can read the decision published by the Second District Court of Appeal here.

Yahoo! News reports:

A federal judge who shuttered the renegade Web site Wikileaks.org reversed the decision Friday and allowed the site to re-open in the United States.

In mid-February, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White issued an injunction against Wikileaks after the Zurich-based Bank Julius Baer accused the site of posting sensitive account information stolen by a disgruntled former employee.

I guess someone showed Judge White a copy of the First Amendment.