Conservative talk show host Michael Savage sued the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in federal district court in California on Monday for copyright infringement. Savage posted a copy of the complaint on his website. He claims that CAIR violated his copyrights in the October 29, 2007 program of the "Michael Savage Show" by excerpting a four-plus minute portion of the show and posting it on CAIR's website.

Last week, I blogged about a lawsuit filed by Effie Mayhew against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, in which Mayhew claims that Grotke and LePage bear liability for a comment a user posted on the iBrattleboro site.

Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed citizen journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, were sued on November 16 for libel based on a comment submitted by one of the site's users.

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, Steve Tobak at CNET published a useful post -- "Bloggers beware: You're liable to commit libel." In it, he gives a straightforward and largely accurate account of the elements of a defamation claim and some good general advice:

John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, has an article coming out in the Utah Law Review in which he concludes that the dichotomy between copyright law and social norms "is so profound that on any given day even the most law-abiding American engages in thousands of actions that likely constitute copyright infringement."

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced this week that they will make 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754, available in a free public archive. The entire archive will be in the public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

As anyone who follows the celebrity rags already knows, a California judge dealt a mortal blow to Samantha Ronson's libel suit againt litigation-magnet Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) two weeks ago. Sadly, we've missed the scoop on this one, but I do have a copy of the transcript of the court's November 1st ruling. Surely the gossip hounds among you won't mind if I delve into the details a little.

Last week, the California First Amendment Coalition published an assessment of several open government reform bills in California's 2007 legislative session. The report shows that while there were some victories, several important reform proposals failed in the legislature or died on the Governor's desk.

Yesterday, lawyers for two female Yale Law School students, captioned as Does I & II, filed an amended complaint dropping Anthony Ciolli as a defendant from the lawsuit they filed against a host of pseudonymous users of the popular law school admissions forum, AutoAdmit.