FEDERAL COURT RULES THAT EBAY IS A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION

From: Steptoe_Newsletter@steptoe.com Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:47 PM Subject: E-Commerce Law Week, Issue 520 E-Commerce Law Week Issue 520, Week Ending April 16, 2008 Court Says eBay is a Criminal Enterprise. Seriously. A federal court in California recently held that eBay's allegedly false statements about the safety of its "Live Auction" service can support a claim against the company under section 1962(c) of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), a statute originally designed to go after organized crime. The ruling is at: http://www.steptoe.com/attachment.html/3504/520a.pdf For your information, 18 USC 1962(c), the section of RICO of interest here states: (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise's affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity or collection of unlawful debt. Although the case involves a civil suit, the court's ruling in Mazur v. eBay Inc. amounts to a remarkable statement that eBay's description of its auction service constitutes criminal behavior. While the Federal Trade Commission has brought actions for "unfair" or "deceptive" acts in commerce against companies whose actual privacy practices did not live up to their stated policies, allowing RICO actions to be brought on the basis of similar misstatements is a giant leap - and could have enormous negative ramifications for websites. (c) Copyright 2008 Steptoe & Johnson LLP.

Blacklight hydrinos are back and get written up in Fortune

Those of you in the patent world with a background in physics have long enjoyed the saga of free-energy inventor Randell Mills, CEO of BlackLight Power, who claims (including in patent claims) that it is possible to generate (free) energy from hydrinos, which are hydrogen atoms one state below the ground state. The Patent Office, in one of its few times where it relied on the physics community and modern physics, has refused to issue any patents to BlackLight, arguing that it is false physics to argue that hydrogen can have a ground state lower than the ground state. Anyway, the September 2008 issue of Fortune Small Business has an article on BlackLight Power. The paragraph 112 test of the patenting laws is next Fall 2009, when they claim they will start installing the energy cells in working power plants.

Another case of pure ugly art is a horse-shaped building

Throughout history, one of the classic forms of sculpture is that of horses, the challenging being to capture the beauty of the natural horse form in a static object. Such sculptures can be made of many materials, including wood, so that a sculpture of a horse done in wood is a work of pure art. Now most such sculptures tend to be life-sized to miniatures, but heck, let's have some fun, be avant-garde artistes and build a horse sculpture the size of a multi-story building. Maybe in tribute to the Trojan horse, itself a work of art in story form. Despite its massive size, it's still a work of art. And what the heck, let's live in this large wooden horse sculpture. Otherwise known as U.S. Patent 5,564,239. All art is art. If some art is patentable, all art is patentable, no matter how many nonsensical statements made by IP government officials and judges, who know less about art than they do about science and engineering.