Yesterday we reported that International Trade Commission (ITC) judge David Shaw recommended to the full ITC Commission that the import of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 slim models should be banned to the US, but patent expert Florian Mueller doesn't see it happening.

City National Bank has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Konami and developer Autumn Games for allegedly defrauding the financial institution of money it is owed related to a $15 million line of credit. City National Bank claims that Konami and Autumn Games defrauded it of $15 million in credit for the development of Def Jam Rapstar. They also alleged that both parties "lied" to the bank in order to secure the credit line, promising to pay it back with the sales of the game.

Microsoft and Motorola have been at each other’s throats for a while now.

Motorola claims that the Xbox 360 uses “Motorola-developed technology that allows set-top boxes to decode transmissions between its Droid2 and DroidX mobile devices” while Microsoft argues that Motorola refused “to abide by requirements set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association to set reasonable license fees of essential technology.”

Documents from the legal battle between Activision and former Infinity Ward studio leads Jason West and Vincent Zampella have been unsealed revealing a bunch of details on the contract between Bungie and Activision. According to the LA Times, the documents are part of the case because the duo's lawyer Robert M. Schwartz is using the details of that deal to demand compensation for his clients.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken has shot down an Electronic Arts request to have a major class action lawsuit against it dismissed. According to a Courthouse News report (see also this PDF) the lawsuit filed by former National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes accusing EA of using their likenesses without providing them with any compensation will go forward.

A Japanese game developer who worked on Dragon's Dogma at Capcom is claiming that she was bullied by her fellow employees to the point where she considered committing suicide. According to an article on Japanese publication Minpokyo, the unnamed 20+ year old female joined Capcom in 2009 and was assigned to the Dragon's Dogma development team. But the trouble began when a senior female employee was assigned to the team too. According to the report, she decided to make it very unpleasant for the unnamed employee.

LA Times reporter Ben Fritz, who is in close proximity of the Activision v. West and Zampella court case happening in Los Angeles today has been furiously tweeting various scoops via his Twitter account. Among the revelations are that Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle has denied Activision's motion to postpone the case for an additional thirty days. The trail will begin as scheduled on May 29.

A lawsuit with record label EMI may very well kill 4mm Games, the company that, along with Terminal Reality, brought the popular DEF Jam Rapstar game to life in late 2010. But the lawsuit with EMI filed earlier this year against both companies may end up bankrupting the studio long before it ever gets to the point of a resolution in the case.

According to a report from Polygon citing a source "familiar with the case," Activision has delivered a check for $47 million to lawyers representing the so-called "Infinity Ward Employee Group." This group made up of ex-employees of the studio that created the popular Call of Duty series claimed that Activision failed to pay to pay them royalties owed on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

We thought that a Manhattan judge had already green lighted a lawsuit filed by game developer Gate Five to sue pop icon Beyonce for $100 million way back in December of 2011, but a new New York Post story about the lawsuit says that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos has ruled that the singer will have to face the "breach of contract" lawsuit filed by the company sometime this summe

Emboldened by The Court of The Hauge’s January ruling that two of the Netherlands’s largest ISPs must implement a DNS and IP block of The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy group BREIN went ahead and sued a few more Dutch ISPs to censor the site.

Well, chalk up another success for BREIN because the Court has ruled that UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort must also block The Pirate Bay.  The blocking order covers 20 specific domains such as ThePirateBay.org, ThePirateBay.se, ThePirateBay.com, DePiraatBaii.be and TheMusicBay.net.

 A lawyer representing the novelist who filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft last month for allegedly infringing on his book "LINK" is defending her client publicly for the first time in this Eurogamer story. The author of the book, John Beiswenger, claims in his lawsuit that Ubisoft violated his copyright in the plot of Assassin's Creed.

Judge James Robart of the U.S. District Court of Western Washington today extended a temporary restraining order that he issued last month that prevents Motorola from enforcing any injunction from any other court against Microsoft until he reaches a decision in the Seattle case. Judge Robart extended the temporary restraining order because he needed more time to sort out the case, but that didn't stop him from delivering some harsh criticisms to both sides of the legal battle over patents and licensing.

A man from Greece, New York (a suburb of Rochester) has been sentenced to six months in jail, ten years of probation and registration as a sex offender in New York State. Twenty-year-old Richard "Ricky" Kretovic pled guilty to the crime of Criminal Sexual Act in March of this year as part of a plea deal and on Friday Monroe County Court Judge Victoria Argento delivered his sentence.

Motorola Mobility has won an injunction against Microsoft in Germany prohibiting the sale of products in the country including Windows 7 and the Xbox 360. The injunction is the latest punch thrown in a bitter patent lawsuit between Motorola and Microsoft

In March of last year the state of Illinois decided to pass a law that collected Internet sales tax from online companies like Amazon.com and eBay. Commonly referred to as an "affiliate nexus tax," the law passed by Illinois and other states including California, Connecticut, and New York, required online retailers who advertised on "affiliate sites" that had a physical presence in the same state to collect sales tax. The Illinois law had broad support among lawmakers and the state’s governor, Gov. Pat Quinn (D).

An International Trade Commission (ITC) judge has ruled that Microsoft violated several patents held by Motorola Mobility when it made its Xbox 360 console. ITC Judge David Shaw said that Microsoft infringed on four of five patents that Motorola filed on its complaint - International Trade Commission, No. 337-752. The patents in the complaint include technology like wireless connections to the Internet and video compression to speed up transmission of data, amongst others.

According to a GigaOM report Apple and Chinese company Proview Technology may soon resolve their ongoing legal battle over the use of the "iPad" name in the region.

A California mother is suing Facebook claiming that the company is allowing minors to make purchases via in-game micro-transactions and that allowing this to happen without parental consent violates California's consumer protection laws.

In a major setback for rights holders doing business in Australia, the High Court of Australia has ruled that Internet providers have no legal obligation to act on copyright infringement notices sent to them by rights holders. The court ruled that copyright infringement notices provide no "reasonable basis for sending warning notices to individual customers containing threats to suspend or terminate those customers' accounts."

Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in July of last year has talked about "training with Call of Duty" and being "obsessed with World of Warcraft" in his 1000+ page manifesto and during his ongoing trial in Oslo, Norway this week. Naturally the media is eating the whole obsessed gamer angle up and reporting on it as fact, but mental health professionals like Seena Fazel are saying that there's a real problem with connecting the dots.

Link, the 2001 sci-fi fantasy book at the center of a lawsuit filed against Ubisoft and GameTrailers, is getting review bombed by angry gamers. Beiswenger, who is also a research engineer that holds over 20 U.S. utility patents, published his novel Link in 2002. The first Assassin's Creed video game was released in 2007. In his lawsuit against Ubisoft and GameTrailers, he alleges that Ubisoft stole core ideas from his book and used them in their games.

The highest court in the European Union has ruled that internet service providers can be compelled by courts to turn over private information of subscribers suspected of engaging in piracy or copyright infringement. Shortly after Sweden's anti-piracy legislation, IPRED, became law in 2009, five book publishers asked a local court to force ISP ePhone to hand over personal details on a subscriber who they allege stored more than 2000 audio books on his server. They claim that 27 of those audio books infringed on their copyrighted works.

As you are probably aware, the trial of Anders Behring Breivik is in its third day in Oslo, Norway. The Norwegian man is charged with murdering 69 people at a summer camp and eight others using a bomb last year - a charge that he has pled not guilty to. Yesterday Breivik took the stand and the media pounced on what he said about gaming, along with what he wrote about it in his lengthy manifesto, along with his anti-Islamist views.

A man named John Beiswenger has sued Ubisoft and GameTrailers for stealing the storyline for Assassin's Creed from a novel he wrote called Link. Nintendo might take issue with that title for obvious reasons. All kidding aside, the confusing part of the lawsuit is why he decided to sue GameTrailers. According to the complaint he named the popular website in the lawsuit for offering a number of video game trailers related to the Assassin's Creed series.

A federal judge has finally granted Apple's motion to intervene on behalf of iOS developers who have found themselves in a legal battle against Lodsys. It took the court nearly a year to come to this decision. This ruling allows the iOS platform holder to argue in court on behalf of developers who have been sued over alleged patent infringement for using the iOS system's in-app purchasing APIs. Apple has licensed the technology from Lodsys so it will argue in court that developers who use the platform do not infringe on the patent because Apple already obtained a license.

Tomorrow the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will ask a federal judge to finally establish a process that allows lawful users - including a number of government agencies - of Megaupload's cloud storage service to reclaim their files. The hearing in USA v. Dotcom is set for 9 a.m. on April 13 at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

A United States District Court has ruled that Microsoft can continue to sell Windows and Xbox 360 products in Germany - even if a German court rules in favor of an injunction request filed by Motorola. The dust up (as reported by Ars Technica) is related to a patented technology essential to the H.264 video standard, which Microsoft uses in its software products. To say the ruling is unusual would be an understatement because a U.S.

On Monday Greek Police raided multiple locations in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki to arrest the operators of the popular BitTorrent site, GreekDDL. The popular file-sharing site has over 500,000 members according to authorities. While law enforcement initiated several raids, only one person was arrested: a 40-year-old woman who is allegedly one of the operators of the site. Police are looking to detain two other site admins, one of whom is reportedly being tracked with the help of Swedish authorities and Interpol. 

Law firm Baron and Budd has reached a settlement agreement with GameStop over DLC. The firm filed a class action lawsuit against the video game retailer over DLC and labeling related to used games. In the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Senior District Judge Thelton E. Henderson entered an order approving a class action settlement Baron and Budd reached with GameStop.