Yesterday, the UC Davis protestors who were pepper sprayed by campus police in response to a non-violent protest filed suit in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California. The plaintiffs, who were students or recent graduates of the university, had occupied the campus quad to protest university privatization, tuition increases, and earlier police beatings of protestors at Occupy Cal.

Continental Appliances, Inc., a California manufacturer of a gas wall heater sold at Lowe’s, sued the unknown poster of a YouTube video on Friday for claiming that its product creates “an imminent danger of fire and serious injury” because of “uncertain fuel settings.” (see below)

The lawsuit appears likely to fail, however.

Here’s why.

I’m from Chicago, where everyone knows someone who knows someone in the mob. That’s why I loved this case, U.S. v Ambrose, sent to me by Laurel. It’s chock full of good mafia stories and lingo involving a crooked Deputy U.S. Marshal and a made guy in the “Chicago outfit” who turned state’s evidence.

In other criminal law cases, a defendant in the 10th Circuit was convicted of selling drugs at his apartment and for selling them within 1000 feet of a playground. Defendant challenged the definition of playground, which the court did not find convincing, holding that even if there was “one apparatus…intended for recreation of children,” then the place was a playground under the statutes. US v. West. In other words, “that’s nice.”

The U.S. Magistrate Judge overseeing Paul Ceglia’s ownership claim case against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook ordered Ceglia to pay nearly $76,000 in attorneys’ fees to Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s lawyers for having to repeatedly go to court to compel Cegila to comply with the judge’s earlier orders.

That is in addition to the $5,000 in sanctions that a judge order Ceglia to pay last month.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio’s only reduced the $84,196 that Facebook sought in attorneys’ fees by 10% in order “to ‘trim’ any ‘fat.'”

Magistrate Judge Foschio’s 39-page decision and order (you can read it below) painstakingly details the legal morass that this litigation has become.

The Associated Press (AP) filed a copyright lawsuit in federal court this morning against the Meltwater Group over the company’s Meltwater News product, charging that the competing site collects, stores, translates, and redistributes AP content to paid subscribers, but without paying the 165-year-old company a penny. Other online news aggregators like Google, Yahoo, and AOL pay licensing fees to use AP content, as do local and national newspapers and media sites.

According to the lawsuit, Meltwater generated more than $100 million in revenue in 2010, in part because it doesn’t pay a thing for content:

Silicon Valley-based solar panel giant SunPower sued five former employees and competitor SolarCity today, contending that shortly before they left SunPower, the employees connected USB drives to the company’s computer network, “and used them to steal tens-of-thousands of computer files” with confidential and non-confidential proprietary information.

In addition to civil damages and injunctive relief, SunPower also wants to hold the ex-employees criminally liable for violating a California law prohibiting unauthorized computer data access and fraud.

The case raises important questions about what, if any, data loss prevention (DLP) systems were in place to prevent employee theft and the loss of such highly confidential and proprietary data. How could the alleged data transfer of information on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales at a Silicon Valley company occur so brazenly?

Any antitrust concerns about Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility were satisfied in Europe and the United States today. Regulatory hurdles were cleared when the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division each approved Google’s purchase of the telecom unit.

The deal bolsters Google’s patent portfolio, and is anticipated to add substantial value to the company’s Android mobile operating system.

Whitey Bulger, the indicted and apprehended alleged ringleader of Boston’s notorious ‘Winter Hill Gang’ organized crime family, needs “a reasonable amount of time to review a tsunami’s worth of discovery,” according to Bulger’s defense lawyers J.W. Carney, Jr. and and Henry B. Brennan.

The statement was made in a filing with the Massachusetts federal court this morning (read the legal filing below).

Just how much material?

Doug Whitman, the head portfolio manager at Whitman Capital, LLC, was indicted by a New York federal grand jury on insider trading and criminal securities fraud charges (read the indictment below).

The indictment alleges that in 2006 and 2007, Whitman’s firm made $900,000 in illegal profits by trading Google and Polycom stocks using material, non-public information that Whitman himself acquired to make the trades.

Whitman is also charged with buying and selling Marvell Technology Group stock and options over roughly two years using insider information.

Montblanc, the German maker of fabled fountain pens and other luxury goods sued Google for help in unmasking the identities of alleged counterfeiters running Google AdWords campaigns on Google’s UK search engine to hawk knockoff pens.

Montblanc’s lawsuit against Google asks the court for equitable relief, i.e.,, not money but a court order granting the penmaker discovery to unmask and confirm the identity of the person or entity placing misleading ads on Google.