The answer was… it didn’t take long. Apple apparently sent the company a nice “we will sue you into ten generations of poverty if you make this collectible figure” letter. In Icons has now announced that it will not sell the action figure after receiving the legal letters from Apple and the Jobs family.

The man behind the action figure company still thinks he thinks he is not breaking the law to make the collectible figure and only made it as a tribute to Jobs. However, he says that he has decided to cancel plans to make the action figure to consider the feelings of the Jobs family. Anyone who pre-ordered the figure will receive a refund.

[In Icons via PC World]

Lovell apparently signed an affidavit that asserted he owned the title to the ring-bound checklist. However, NASA says that there is no indication that Lovell was ever assigned the title to the document. NASA’s legal eagle noted that only NASA has the right to sell NASA property.

The auction firm, Heritage Auctions, is keeping the document in its vault and has suspended the sale until the legal wrangling is over. Lovell had sold the checklist at the auction house for $380,000. Apollo 13 was the moon mission that had a tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth, which forced the crew to return home. NASA is also disputing the legal right to several other space items Heritage Auctions has sold in the past.

[via ABCNews]

Hasbro filed the superfluous lawsuit last week, saying that the tablet’s name is too similar to its Transformers brand. It wants damages and a temporary injunction on the device, while sane and level-headed people just want Hasbro to shut up and churn out toys for the holidays.

Forget the fact that Transformers toys these days are pretty low quality and unimaginative too. I guess they would rather spend their time suing over something silly than offering a quality product, or insisting on a decent movie from their licensees. Merry Christmas from the folks at Hasbro.

I’m not really a big Transformers fan, but I think this is just stupid. What do you guys think? Is Asus really in the wrong here?

[via Geek.com]

A company in China has had the iPad trademark since 2000. The company is called Proview Technologies and it actually sold the rights to iPad to another firm for the UK and other countries. That company then sold it to Apple. The problem was that apparently Chinese rights weren’t part of the original sale.

That means that Apple has been peddling the iPad in violation of the trademark in China for a while now. China is booming and important to most tech firms so Apple can’t just walk away. Proview is apparently looking for (imagine Dr. Evil as you read this next part) a billion dollars. Will Apple have to change its tablet’s name in China or pay up big time? That remains to be seen.

[via Reuters]

The application shows that the name will be used on different devices including smartphones and tablets. Once the Nexus launches early next month the next device will quite possibly carry this product name. The trademark in question is serial number 85480030 and it was filed on November 23, 2011.

Samsung has offered up no official comment on the name or when we might see the devices come to market using the name. What do you think we will see? My money is on a thin, quad core tablet with 4G, running Android 4.0.

[via Fusible]

Investigators are knocking on doors around the country and asking people to either give back or delete their pirated copies of Modern Warfare 3. Many complied instead of facing fines. I wonder how many doors they had to knock on. And really, it’s only disc 2. Was it worth the potential fine? I don’t think so.

[via venturebeat]

The new Terms of Service force two things significant new things on you. First, Sony wants you to agree that you will not be involved in a class-action suit against them. The lawsuit line is one at a time only in PSN-land. Sony also wants you to agree that it gets to pick the arbitrator of the suit if you were to sue them individually.

The wild part is that if you don’t agree to the terms you face being banned from entering PSN. Apparently, you can opt out of agreeing to the new TOS by snail-mailing Sony a letter stating as much. That little tidbit is reportedly hidden in the fine print though and most won’t see it. I wonder what they will do if a kid too young to make a binding decision agrees to the TOS. Do any of you actually read the full TOS before you accept terms?

[via BBC]

The charges were serious and Crippen faced as much as a decade in prison if convicted. The fly in the ointment for the prosecution came before the trial got started with the judge presiding over the case lecturing the prosecution. Apparently, the key video evidence of Crippen modding the consoles in his home was obtained in an illegal method.

After the judge chewed out the prosecution, they opted to drop the charges “based on fairness and justice.” I just don’t get it, we have rapists and drug dealers running around the country and we are actually trying to put people away for modding game consoles. Sometimes I wonder where the legal system went wrong. At least in this case, justice prevailed and the charges were dropped.

[Via Wired]

The FCC had “hundreds” of complaints by users claiming that they were charge $1.99 per megabyte for data on phones with no data plan. Some of the data was accessed when the users say the phone wasn’t in use and others were charged when they accidentally activated the browser. Verizon says that the “error” was found on investigate of its accounts and that refunds will be issued.

The total of the refunds could hit $90 million and the average user will get somewhere between $2 and $6 credit to their bill. Users who were overcharged and are no longer a customer of Verizon will get a check in the mail. About 15 million users will get the refunds.

The issues happened in 2008 and 2009 with notebooks from Dell, HP, and Apple having various issues that were to do with faulty NVIDIA hardware inside. NVIDIA has been fighting to prove its hardware was not at fault and has finally thrown in the towel.

NVIDIA has now agreed to a settlement, yet still admits no wrong in the case. The settlement will see HP notebook owners with affected machines getting replacement notebooks. Apple and Dell owners will get new GPUs. Owners of machines from any company that paid to have the machine fixed may get as much as $2,000.

As a result, Lucasfilm sent Wicked Lasers a cease and desist letter demanding that the laser get a disclaimer that it wasn’t associated with Lucasfilm or Star Wars along with some printed clippings of stories printed online that called the thing a lightsaber. Apparently, the legal battle is now raging and Lucasfilm wants the thing off the market.

Wicked Lasers is offering the real cease and desist letter on eBay in an auction that will get the winner the full packet from Lucasfilm that we shall refer to as the packet of douchebaggery. Bidding is up to $355 last I checked, and that letter would be great mounted in a holder with the laser below it. Wicked Lasers people reading this: send me one of these lasers and a pic of our pal George. I’d like to burn “douche” into his picture using it while dressed like Jar Jar Binks – simultaneously showing off two of the dumbest things to ever happen in the Star Wars universe, me-sa thinks.

The product in question is Canned Unicorn Meat. ThinkGeek listed the product along with a catchy slogan “Unicorn – the new white meat.” The National Pork Board didn’t like that. I bet they were equally pissed when Fat Bastard uttered “Baby – the other, other white meat… GET IN MY BELLAY!”

The legal firm wants ThinkGeek to stop using the slogan immediately. ThinkGeek says that their usage is protected as parody. All I know is this cease and desist letter has to be one of the dumbest wastes of paper I have ever seen, and I read a few chapters of Twilight.

I’m not sure what would be worse, being the lawyer who had to send this letter or having your penis cut off in a freak Weed Eater accident.

I mentioned yesterday how AT&T had threatened a customer with a cease and desist letter for emailing the CEO twice over a few week period. The dude took his story online and the shit storm raged in an epic and biblical way ultimately resulting in AT&T realizing that someone had better apologize.

That lucky soul was a senior AT&T VP and he was thrown under the bus headfirst to take blame of the legal threat. The guy who was threatened, Giorgio Galante, told Engadget that he got a call from a senior VP at AT&T who said the whole legal threat was a misunderstanding coming from a bad interpretation of AT&T corporate policy. Galante accepted the apology and still plans to leave for Sprint and a shiny new EVO 4G. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson should have just answered the dudes email Jobs style and this would have never happened. Is it just me or if the CEO really felt bad and wanted to look good, would he have not called himself? Our pal Steve has pretty much killed the “a CEO is too busy to read your emails” excuse.

One AT&T customer has really come face to face with the reality that AT&T’s CEO really hates his opinions. Hates his opinions enough in fact to threaten the customer with legal action for emailing him. I blame Steve Jobs for this one. If Jobs didn’t answer his own emails, geeks around the world wouldn’t think a CEO should actually have a rapport with the people who pay for their massive golden parachutes.

A guy named Giorgio G. emailed AT&T CEO Tooly McTool, I mean Randall Stephenson. The subject of the email the first time around was to ask for a change in the guy’s iPhone upgrade status and the second email landed him a call from an executive response staffer telling him to stop emailing the CEO. Brilliant. The customer is always right, right?

Feel free to drop Randall your own email here.

[via Tumblr]

TiVo has now been granted a patent that may mean the death of one of the most important features on any DVR. The TiVo patent covers the company’s Season Pass software that resides on its DVRs. What the patent really covers is any system that allows the DVR to resolve conflicts when scheduled recordings overlap.

Without that software, the DVR would not know what shows to record and what show to skip. TiVo is a big fan of suing anyone who treads close to one of its patents so expect wide scale suits to be filed any day now since every DVR on the globe has this feature. A reported workaround may be to put the scheduling software on a remote server somewhere since the patent is for client side software only.

[via DavisFreeberg.com]

The companies today announced an agreement which will enable Sony to include vibration feedback (a.k.a. “haptic technology,”) in their products once more. Although Sony insisted that it was for technical reasons, this lawsuit is widely believed to be the reason that rumble was omitted from the PS3′s SIXAXIS controller. Now that it’s all water under the bridge, it’s definitely possible that Sony could release an upgraded controller capable of both motion-sensing AND rumble. The settlement is reported to have cost Sony at least $22.5 million in cash between now and the end of 2009.

[via Joystiq]

According to this report over at CrunchGear, Apple had been in negotiations with Cisco to seek permission to use the iPhone brand name, but never finalized the agreement prior to yesterday’s public announcement at Macworld. Now, since the agreement was never executed, Cisco has filed a lawsuit against Apple, Inc. to prevent their use of the iPhone moniker.

Cisco claims they entered into good faith negotiations with Apple and is now seeking injunctive relief to prevent apple from using the Cisco’s trademark. I suppose they could always just rename it “Apple Phone” – that seemed to do the trick for their set top box. I’d assume the two companies will eventually make nice, but not without some big bucks exchanging hands (especially for the lawyers!)

[via Yahoo! Finance]

Here’s an excerpt of what Lik-Sang had to say about the whole debacle:

Lik-Sang.com, the popular gaming retailer from Hong Kong, has today announced that it is forced to close down due to multiple legal actions brought against it by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Sony claimed that Lik-Sang infringed its trademarks, copyright and registered design rights by selling Sony PSP consoles from Asia to European customers, and have recently obtained a judgment in the High Court of London (England) rendering Lik-Sang’s sales of PSP consoles unlawful… As of today, Lik-Sang.com will not be in the position to accept any new orders and will cancel and refund all existing orders that have already been placed. Furthermore, Lik-Sang is working closely with banks and PayPal to refund any store credits held by the company, and the customer support department is taking care of any open transactions such as pending RMAs or repairs and shipping related matters. The staff of Lik-Sang will make sure that nobody will get hurt in the crossfire of this ordeal.

Sony claims that they were trying to “protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards,” but Lik-Sang says that all PSP consoles they shipped included genuine Sony 100V-240V AC Adapters that carry CE and other safety marks for worldwide use. A press release has been posted explaining the whole sordid situation.

I think we know this has nothing to do with power supplies and everything to do with protecting distribution channels. Stupid lawyers.

Lik-Sang, you will be missed.