Hide your Insta Slim Compression Shirts, hide your Kitty Washroom Cabinets - SkyMall has filed for bankruptcy.

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Did you ever make a last minute decision to not attend a party you were invited to? Did the host send you a bill for what your attendance would have cost them? Are you also five-years-old?

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Unable to prevent a family in their neighborhood from renovating their house in a likeness of Carl Fredricksen's in Up by appealing to city officials, some folks in Santa Clara, California, are just coincidentally suing the family for contaminating the neighborhood with lead during their renovation efforts.

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Last spring we told you the riveting tale how Behind the Lines Productions, creator of the Twilight parody Twiharder, decided to sue Lionsgate and Summit on the grounds that they're big meanies who unfairly monopolize the Twilight franchise... a franchise they, y'know, own the rights to. Behind the Lines has some gumption, I'll give them that. Except now that gumption's gotten them countersued by Lionsgate, whose 204 page countercomplaint can be basically summed up as "...You guys aren't serious, right?"

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Over what infraction did one man ask a court for trial by combat? Click ahead to find out!

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There's a lot here in this story. There's a couple of fifteen year old girls who were barred from handing out breast cancer awareness bracelets by their school district. There's the much debated trend in breast cancer awareness campaigns to skew to a focus on the sexual appeal of breasts rather than the saving of lives as the motivating factor. There's the parents who thought that this was a violation of their daughters' First Amendment rights that was worth taking it all the way to a federal appeals court. But mostly, there's the undeniably delightful idea that a Supreme Court justice of America might say the word "boobies" on the record during a session.

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Last week, TorrentFreak published a great story about law firms that are also copyright trolls. As part of the article, they published a subpoena response from Comcast showing that an IP address connected with one firm was trolling torrent sites. Now, Comcast has loosed its lawyers, leveling charges of copyright infringement at TorrentFreak.

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I can't blame you if you haven't been following the Department of Justice's suit against Apple and (originally) five other book publishers for price fixing in the eBook market. It's kind of arcane and weird, but it's an arcane and weird thing that may affect the entire electronic book market, and if you're the kind of book reader who looks at gamers flipping out about DRM that places unreasonable requirements on the user and thinks "there but for the grace of God go I," you might want to pay attention. Just in case.

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Why do people think they can get away with crowdfunding something that doesn't belong to them? 

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Wait until you hear why.

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So you may have heard that there's a porn parody of Universal's putative NC-17 rated Fifty Shades of Grey movie, even though Universal hasn't even cast it yet. And some of those among you who were not aware are now surely nodding and saying "Yes, this was inevitable." Well, it was also inevitable that Universal would sue the Fifty Shades porn parody for copyright and trademark infringement, which they are doing. But what wasn't inevitable was that Smash Pictures, the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation, would come up with an even moderately clever counter suit.

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It didn't really surprise anyone to find out HBO's Game of Thrones was the most pirated show of 2012. After all, HBO is a paid subscription service and many people don't like their limited expensive options in a world immediate entertainment. But I suppose it doesn't help the cause when one of the people working the show, a director to be more specific, publicly says he doesn't mind when people pirate his show. And it just so happens that The Copyright Alert System is about to start sending us all notices to stop the illegal downloads. Great timing, dude. 

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The new and growing market for eBooks has allowed companies to call into question some of the basic and universal characteristics of reading and owning books. That you can loan them to your friends, for example, or that by purchasing a book you're also purchasing the ability to read it whenever you want, wherever you want, until you lose it, donate it, give it away, or wear through its well-loved spine. eBook publishers have, to put it mildly, established that these are qualities of a book that they do not intend to carry over to the new format, which is to a certain extent fine, so long as consumers know what they're getting into. But the eBook market also has other problems, namely accusations of price fixing, and, due to the combination of software that limits the kind of device a given eBook can be read on and the dominance of the Kindle over the eReader market, bullying tactics. A new lawsuit filed by three independent bookstores is looking to strike at the heart of the problem: the insistance of eReader makers that their books should not be readable on other devices.

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Two Tolkien estate stories in one day? Are they trying to steal Beyonce's thunder or something? 

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Ed Kramer, the co-founder of Atlanta, Georgia's Dragon*Con has been in trouble with the law for years. He's recently been extradited back to the state on child-molestation charges dating back to 2000 and while he no longer claims association with the convention, he still receives financial compensation from it thanks to shares he holds in the corporation. As a response to the most recent events, some creators are calling for a boycott of Dragon*Con until they take steps to remove Kramer from the institution entirely.

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Because, like, you might not survive if you can't look at things like this. According to a new ruling in Germany, that is.

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Well, they aired it, seemingly unchanged. And it’s now for sale in the US iTunes store. They also got in touch with my peeps to basically say that they’re within their legal rights to do this, and that I should be happy for the exposure (even though they do not credit me, and have not even publicly acknowledged that it’s my version – so you know, it’s kind of SECRET exposure). While they appear not to be legally obligated to do any of these things, they did not apologize, offer to credit me, or offer to pay me, and indicated that this was their general policy in regards to covers of covers. It does not appear that I have a copyright claim, but I’m still investigating the possibility (which I consider likely) that they used some or all of my audio. I’ll write something longer and more detailed about this when I can get my head together about it probably in a couple of days. Thanks for your support, but please continue not to burn anything down. -- Jonathan Coulton, in a recent update to his blog. Last night Glee returned after a holiday hiatus with the episode "Sadie Hawkins" and a soft-rock version of "Baby Got Back," that is unmistakably nerd-rocker Jonathan Coulton's soft-rock version of "Baby Got Back." The musician updated fans and readers of his blog this morning with this information on Fox and Glee's really absurd notion that "exposure" is his payment despite the fact that they have so far refused to publicly credit him with the arrangement. If Coulton hadn't already had a strong, connected fanbase, nobody might have noticed that he'd been ripped off.

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