So Business 2.0 magazine loses another writer/blogger, and Valleywag loses Nick Denton (again). Owen Thomas has jumped from his B2.0 blog duties to the editorship of the "Wag".

Call it a TKO win for IBM, as years of jabbing over a variety of patents held by IBM and disputed by Amazon have ended with Amazon agreeing to pay licensing fees for them.

The idea of a “Google killer” has lost most of its meaning – challenger after challenger came along, assumed that title, and proceeded to fail miserably.  Google Video may face a real threat in the form of Blinkx, however – the Autonomy corporation has announced plans to demerge that video search engine.

March was a busy month for lawsuits involving bloggers and webmasters. The court system taking them to task for defamatory statements, with one case becoming the first to go to trial and result in a liability verdict.

A legal system once tentative about taking on digital cases is braving the waters with more frequency. Most of the cases we’ve reported on have involved the statements of anonymous commentators, liability for which webmasters and bloggers have been repeatedly exonerated (or are expected to be). But these are different.

The WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C), in May 0f 1999, issued Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which outlined methods of making web content easily accessible to the visually and physically impaired. In those guidelines the W3C stated plainly,

Microsoft will distribute vouchers valuing $37.8 million to Arkansas and $224 million to Wisconsin as part of two proposed class-action lawsuit settlements. The vouchers will be redeemable by residents of the respective states to obtain free software and hardware.

The legal dispute between Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Oklahoma designer Leslie Jennings over the so-called “party plane” has been settled, according to a report in the New York Sun.

The European Registry of Internet Domain names (EURid) suspended the registrations of over 74,000 .eu domains and accused 400 registrars of warehousing names for resale.

A dozen high-powered companies inside and outside of the technology industry jointly requested Congress pass a law to protect the privacy of consumers, while insulating them from being “brought to their knees” by class-action lawsuits.

Netflix is forging a new weapon to employ in its eternal war against Blockbuster. Or, depending on one’s point of view, it’s creating a nifty new product for its customers. The item in question is an Internet-connected, set-top box that would download movies overnight, eliminating the (small) hassle of mail service.

I’ve got three tabs open with Microsoft legal issues, so its time to unload them all at once, real fast:

Arsenal and England international left back Ashley Cole is displeased in a legal sense over Google’s alternative suggestion in search results for his name.

We take a break from the several thousand spam messages received from a certain online dating service to mention how Match and Yahoo have landed in separate court cases over their personals services.

A Bad Year for Information Security

Long-running patent suits between the two technology companies finally come to a close with a settlement.

Long-running JPEG format conflict heats up in the courts, as each firm files new claims against the other.