What started off as a media dream story (with the words “Rupert Murdoch,” “employs” and “hacker” all in the same headline) ended on a very anticlimactic, and somewhat humorous, note. Readers might remember the DISH Network lawsuit that hoped to receive nearly $1 billion in damages from

The French government outlawed the use of Blackberry devices used to send and receive emails earlier this year because of fears that other countries’ security agencies will pick up the transmissions, French newspaper Le Monde reported.

Nine months of internal emails were stolen earlier this month from MediaDefender, an anti-piracy firm used by recording companies and Hollywood studios. A group devoted to countering anti-piracy measures, aptly named MediaDefender-Defenders, claimed responsibility for the theft. After obtaining the documents, MediaDefender-Defenders dispersed the emails digitally through peer-to-peer programs.
Now the emails are posted on [...]

It’s really hard to close the barn door AFTER the cow has left, but that is what the FTC is trying to do. The Federal Trade Commission accidentally disclosed confidential trade secrets of Whole Foods yesterday in a court filing.
At issue was that in trying to protect competitive secrets, court officials [...]

Qualcomm Inc. announced today the resignation of General Counsel Lou Lupin. Lupin had been known for his aggressive “take no prisoners” approach. Carol Lam, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, was named his interim successor. Analysts are thinking that in pushing Lupin out [...]

The Senate Finance and Judiciary committees have released the results of their investigation into the SEC’s firing of a former staff lawyer, Gary Aguirre, in September 2005.
Mr. Aguirre had been leading the SEC investigation into possible illegal insider trading by large hedge fund Pequot Capital that is run by Arthur J. Samberg.
Aguirre was fired after [...]

The State Attorney General of North Carolina announced another settlement in the environmental services bid rigging scandal that has been investigated over the past three years.
In this latest settlement, CBM Environmental Services and its CEO will pay $350,000 for conspiring to rig bids for cleanup work associated with leaky underground petroleum tanks.
CBM is the eighth [...]

A Long Island man pleaded guilty on Wednesday of conspiring to destroy a rival company’s product. Robert A. Schetty, III, 42, a vice president of Technic, Inc., coordinated an attempt to place hydrogen peroxide in a bath of chemicals used by rival company Rohm and Haas, Co. to test their new electroplating solution. [...]

In a stunning surprise to most, coated-paper maker Stora Enso North America Corp. has been acquitted of price-fixing in a federal jury trial in Connecticut. The company had been indicted by DOJ in December 2006 on charges of conspiring with competitors to fix coated magazine paper prices during 2002-03.
Stora’s North American division is [...]

We are filing this one under the category of “Careful Communications” as the Pakistani government is reporting that five people were killed in Kararchi several days ago as a direct consequence of falling billboards in the city which collapsed due to strong winds…
Police confirmed the deaths which were caused when at least twenty billboards [...]

Online virtual worlds like “Second Life” continue to grow at a rapid clip. Commerce, business meetings, and other far racier ‘encounters’ are becoming more commonplace in these virtual worlds.
To help protect its reputation, IBM announced this week that it was establishing a code of conduct to govern its more than 5,000 employees who [...]

As the Toronto Star is reporting, a Canadian couple is being accused of illegal insider trading stemming from a deal that he learned about through recovering emails on behalf of executives at the company where he worked.
According to the Ontario Securities Commission, Shane Bashir Shuman, who worked in the IT department of MDS Sciex, improperly [...]

Amaranth Advisors LLC, a collapsed hedge fund, was charged by federal regulators with attempting to manipulate natural gas markets. The company is charged with attempting to lower the price of natural gas on the New York Mercantile Exchange in order to profit through an electronic futures exchange company, InterContinental Exchange Inc.
The Commodity Futures Trading [...]

The French competition regulator, Conseil de la Concurrence, has fined the country’s three mobile telephone companies (Orange France, FranC’aise du Radiot, and Bouygues Telecom SA) a total of $631 million for illegally restricting competition.
Investigators found that between 1997 and 2003, the operators regularly exchanged information about new and canceled contracts and used this information [...]

According to an exclusive report coming out of Bloomberg, Medtronic, the world’s largest maker of electronic heart devices, has agreed to pay more than $75 million to settle lawsuits claiming it hid defects in its defibrillators.
Medtronic has been facing approximately 2,000 claims over battery defects in the defibrillators which are potentially fatal and had [...]

Verizon Wireless could find itself paying more than $8 million to settle claims that it violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and sent out over 10,000 junk faxes to business in Louisiana, Florida and Alabama. While this case (one of about a dozen of its kind against Verizon) has been settled for $6 million, [...]

As reported in the Associated Press, a Honda car dealership in New Mexico is in trouble after hiring a direct-mail marketing company which sent out 50,000 scratch-off tickets to local residents as part of a promotion. One of the 50,000 tickets was supposed to be a $1,000 grand prize winner.
The problem?
A typo and proofing [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a 6-3 vote this past week to toss out a Quebec class-action lawsuit against Dell Computer over incorrect prices that were mistakenly posted online.
A Montreal man, Olivier Dumoulin, had filed suit against Dell because the company refused to honor the lower prices for Axim handheld personal digital [...]

Office Depot is feeling the heat surrounding its recent warning to investors that sales were down due to a weak economy. The problem? It seems that some Wall Street analysts were privy to the information a week earlier.
According to the analysts, the warning they received from the Office Depot Investor Relations Department re-emphasized earlier alerts [...]

From our “in-case-you-missed-it-while-out-on-your- holidays-during-July” file the DOJ announced gleefully that four former executives with computer networking and security vendor Enterasys Networks Inc. had been sentenced to long prison terms for their roles in accounting fraud at the company.
The executives were originally convicted on conspiracy and fraud charges during a December 2006 trial.
In U.S. District Court [...]

According to media reports, global investment banking and brokerage firm Morgan Stanley is facing yet another lawsuit about inappropriate sexual harassment by employees.
This case is based on accusations of former Morgan Stanley assistant against her boss, a broker in the bank’s Melville, Long Island office. As the NY Daily News reported last week:
 
In a [...]

As reported in the UK’s Guardian and BBC News, global cosmetics giant L’Oréal and its outside employment services firm Adecco were found guilty last week of racial discrimination after they sought to exclude non-white women from promoting a line of shampoo.
The French campaign group SOS Racisme brought the case against the Garnier division of [...]

Abbott Laboratories has been ordered to pay $6 million for allegedly discriminating against a contract employee, Carol Tomao, based on age and her disability (Lupus).
The jury awarded $5.4 million in punitive damages and $600,000 in compensatory damages.
Tomao had alleged in the civil suit that after being assured for several years she would be converted to [...]