• They’re buying something from you, and you are betting against it. And you want people to trust you? I wouldn’t trust you.
• Sen. Carl Levin • Talking in very harsh terms to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein – a hearing put together in the wake of the SEC lawsuit against the company. He and other Goldman staffers looked really uncomfortable with being there, and Levin didn’t help – especially due to all the profanity he was using in criticizing them. He said “)*#(%@” eleven freaking times in a ten-minute period. source

• one
  million number of women that could
  sue Wal-Mart in a class action
  trial over unfair pay
• nine
  years amount of time this case
  has been winding through the
  federal courts source

• » Oh, just an FYI: This court case is weeding its way through the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court. Wal-Mart plans to appeal the case. If you remember our article from yesterday, this doesn’t bode well for the result.

• one Apple sits on the steering committee of the task force that raided Jason Chen’s house.
• two Jason Chen, as you might imagine, owns a lot of computers; here’s what got taken away.
• three It’s still inconclusive as to whether the search warrant was legal. Some say yes; some no.

• $3.46
  billion size of Goldman Sachs’ profits this quarter, which is kind of a lot
• 91%
  boost the amount the company’s earnings went up from a year ago source

• 3-2 the vote which sealed the
  landmark suit’s fate source

• Who are the real bizarro hippies, anyway? In December, just after the election that will prove whether or not the movement actually has steam, different strains of Florida hippies will find themselves in a courtroom debating if anyone has ownership of the the name. After lawyer Fred O’Neal registered the name for a political party, it became a big issue, especially after he and his partner Doug Guetzloe started strong-arming fellow groups not to use the name. Those fighting against O’Neal and Guetzloe claim they aren’t “real” bizarro hippies. Do they have tests for this? source

• YES thanks legislature; now she’s gonna sue too! source

• 11 states plan to sue the
  government over health care,
  ten in a class-action suit
• 36 states have pending lawsuits,
  bills or legislation against the
  health care bill source

• Oh boy, this is getting testy. YouTube and Viacom’s long-running lawsuit is still going on, and if anything, it’s heating up. On one side is Viacom, claiming the site was designed around copyright infringement. On the other is YouTube/Google, claiming that Viacom’s conduct suggests the company if full of hypocrites. Who’s right? Take a gander for yourself:

Viacom’s corner: “You’re stealing our stuff!”

• YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement.
• A statement from Viacom • Regarding what they feel is a culture of copyright infringement – a statement they released after documents from a lawsuit between the two firms became public today. Viacom first sued the Google-owned company in 2007 for $1 billion. They used old statements from the founders suggesting that they knew what they were doing – ripping off copyrighted content.

YouTube’s corner: “You guys are total hypocrites!”

• Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. … Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
• YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine • Giving his take on the lawsuit and documents on the site’s blog. He argues that YouTube is following the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Viacom themselves would send employees to a Kinkos for the singular purpose of uploading content to the site, going as far as “roughing up” the video to make it seem like it’s from a second-hand source. Oh, and allowing copyrighted video to just stay on the site. source

• HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.
• HTC Chief Executive Officer Peter Chou • Regarding the lawsuit that Apple filed against it. They’re not backing down, which is probably a good move on their part. If anything, though, Google should figure out a way to help them, seeing as it’s, again, a proxy war. HTC notes that it’s made 50 smartphones since 2002, so they know a thing or two about innovation in the market. source