Regulators in North Carolina found artwork by famed artist Ralph Steadman, on Flying Dog's Freezin' Season beer, somehow objectionable. Naturally, Flying Dog, who has a history of winning these arguments, has them headed for court.

Reason:

The offending label—like all Flying Dog beers—contains a distinctive cartoon image by illustrator Ralph Steadman, whose work with the Maryland-based brewery dates back to its roots in the gonzo-lands near Aspen, Colorado.

T Greg Doucette is the lawyer who put the pieces together on the University of North Carolina's $2.5m handout to the white nationalist group the Sons of Confederate Veterans, then found and published a smoking gun in the form of a "victory letter" written by the SOCV's "commander" Kevin Stone, which Stone and the SOCV used a fraudulent DMCA notice to censor.

Mormonleaks is a whistleblower site dedicated to revealing corruption and hypocrisy in the Church of Latter Day Saints; over four months, it has published many documents that did just that, but when it published a leaked Powerpoint revealing the Church's view on "the roots of apostasy, such as pornography, campaigns to ordain women, challenges to church history and general 'lack of righteousness,'" the Church turned to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a bogus claim of copyright infringement to get the document taken down.

2016's lawsuit between Paramount and the Trekkers who crowdfunded Axanar, a big-budged fan film set in the Trekverse, continues its slog through the courts, and continues to be enlivened by the interventions of the Language Creation Society, an organization of synthetic language enthusiasts, whose amicus briefs ask the court to reject Paramount's claim of a copyright in the synthetic language of Klingon, which has many speakers, including some who learned it as their first language.

CBS has a story on "revenge porn" sleaze Craig Brittain, whose website solicits private photos, then funnels the victims' takedown requests to a non-existent "lawyer" who advertises outrageous fees.

The website was started about a year ago and is operated by Craig Brittain, a 28-year-old Colorado Springs resident.

After snatching a notorious copyright troll's name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive legal threats spewed out by the domain's previous owner.

"The Swiss courts don't play games and registrars here cannot be scared," said Stefan Thalberg of Ort Cloud, an ISP based in Zürich. — Read the rest

Copyright troll Righthaven was conceived of as a way of extorting money from websites on behalf of newspaper owners when quotations from those newspapers were posted to the web. The idea was that the newspapers would assign "the right to sue" to Righthaven, which would pursue lawsuits on their behalf, and share the take. — Read the rest

Ken at Popehat — a lawyer — describes the pro bono action he fought on behalf of Michael Hawkins, the scienceblogger behind For the Sake of Science, after Hawkins found himself threatened with a lawsuit by Christopher Maloney, a "naturopath" whose methodologies Hawkins had pointedly questioned and mocked. — Read the rest