Tech Law: AT&T Sues Verizon, Apple Beats Psystar, More

A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits.

AT&T suing Verizon over 3G ad — It seems that AT&T heard the recent Verizon ads that slammed the former’s 3G coverage loud and clear and is both suing and asking for a restraining order. The Verizon ad shows a map of the apparently spotty coverage that AT&T 3G service has and AT&T wants the map to show all coverage, which would be sort of beside the point. [Source: AppleInsider]

New Intel general counsel is antitrust expert — Intel has a new general counsel: A. Douglas Melamed, who has major antitrust experience. Given Intel’s recently experiences in Europe and New York State, to say nothing of paying $1.25 billion to AMD, it doesn’t seem like a big surprise. [Source: CNET]

BlueHippo ticking off the FTC — Last year, PC reseller BlueHippo entered a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the company told people without good credit that they could buy a computer over time, like a lay-a-way program, but didn’t end up shipping computers. But the FTC now says that the company didn’t change its activities, taking in $15 million from customers without delivering anything in return. Oops. Maybe they just misplaced the shipping addresses. [Source: Ars Technica]

Apple wins case against Psystar — A judge finally ruled in Apple’s favor in its copyright infringement suit against Mac cloner Psystar [Source: CNET]

EU to require users to authorize cookies — Here’s one of those things that is likely to cause a lot of pain to a lot of web sites. The European Union has approved a law that would require users to consent to each cookie stored on their systems. [Source: WSJ Digits]

Swiss privacy group suing Google over Street View — A privacy group in Switzerland is suing Google to get it to blur personally identifying information in Street View images. [Source: AP]

Gavel image via Flickr user Thomas Roche, CC 2.0.