Back in April, we wrote about how the state of Oregon was threatening Carl Malamud, an activist who has been working hard for years to get public content more widely available to people online, for daring to publish Oregon's laws online. The state claimed copyright, not over the laws, but over the presentation of the laws, which Malamud had scanned. After the public outcry over this, Oregon backed down, and Malamud has continued his efforts.

A few years back, that I accidentally added an extra zero to a bill I paid for phone service. The company automatically credited the account, and a quick call got them to send a check with the overpaid amount. I know others who have accidentally paid a bill twice, or simply overpaid a bill because they didn't have the exact amount of the bill handy and wasn't able to look up the specifics. In most cases, the companies in question would just credit the difference. However, it turns out that Citibank had a different idea.

For all the trouble surrounding e-voting, some folks believe that optical scan technologies that simply count the paper ballot votes are a decent solution. Of course, those optical scan technologies are often made by the same companies that make the e-voting equipment, and have been shown to have numerous problems going back many years.

We've noted that Metallica has basically spent nearly the last decade trying to recover from the damaged reputation the band brought on itself when drummer Lars Ulrich freaked out about Napster and started suing. While the band has been trying to become more online friendly with its latest album release, you still had to wonder how Ulrich would react to the album being leaked online before the official release date.

Here's a question for you: can someone own the copyright on the history of a musical group? We may find out as a lawsuit moves forward concerning the "ownership" of the story of a famous band. As you may know, there's been a popular musical called Jersey Boys about the history of the musical group The Four Seasons -- and now there's the inevitable argument over who gets to earn money from that musical.

You can't trust your IT admin -- or at least that's the story being pushed by a security firm that released the eye-catching study results saying that 88% of IT admins surveyed would take "sensitive company" info such as passwords, if they were fired.

In early 2007, some Thai government officials totally overreacted to a silly video making fun of Thailand's king, and banned all of YouTube. Of course, the inevitable result wasn't that the video went away, but that it got a lot more attention both inside and outside of Thailand thanks to the futile attempt to ban it. Since then, it's clear that Thai officials have not learned their lesson.

We've covered the bizarre AutoAdmit lawsuit for a while now, but the story just keeps getting more ridiculous. If you don't recall, AutoAdmit was a forum site used by law students to discuss all sorts of things -- some of which were crude and potentially offensive. Two women law students who got upset about how they were portrayed on the site ended up filing a bunch of lawsuits over the site, and some of those who were included in the lawsuit sued back (what do you expect with a bunch of law students?).

Last week, Major League Baseball introduced instant replay for the first time (oddly, MLB rushed the introduction mid-season, with no real testing), which has many wondering if the rather "human" element of umpires making bad calls will be a lost element of the game. While it can suck when such wrong calls go against your team, the umpires' ability to screw up has always been a part of the appeal to many fans of the game.

One of the things you learn about Silicon Valley after you've been here for just a little while is that there are some folks around here who are really, really into the technology and innovation aspect of things -- and then there are those who are only around for the money. Sometimes it's not as easy to tell the two apart as you would think, and that's opened up tremendous opportunities for con men.