If the current rash of courtroom events surrounding Victoria's Secret is what CEO Sharen Turney had in mind when she indicated that the company might have become "too sexy", I think there may be trouble in store for that flagship name of Limited Brands Inc. (NYSE: LTD). I don't know about you, but I find courtroom litigation anything but sexy. Unless of course, we're talking about the assistant district attorneys they cast for Law and Order.

First, Victoria's Secret pulled an 'Atomic Wedgie" on Kentucky couple, Victor and Cathy Moseley, by gaining a court order to block the couple from using a truncated version of The Victoria's Secret name. It's no big deal really because it was fairly obvious that the names "Victor's Secret" and "Victor's Little Secret" were pretty flagrant abuses of a trademarked name which deserves secure protection. The one little triumph which came out of that decade-long legal tussle was that the court determined that plaintiffs in trademark infringement cases do not need to show that the infringement actually cost them money, as revealed in a decidedly not sexy Associated Press news blurb.

Next, we find out that Juicy Couture has grabbed Victoria's Secret by the seat of the pants, regarding alleged product marketing infringement. It seems that Juicy thinks that Vicky has infringed on various aspects of packaging, color schemes and logo placement, as explained by blogger Bruce Watson. Personally, I haven't analyzed the claimed offenses. I'll leave that to the courts. I do however find the whole thing to be a bit blown out of proportion -- and very un-sexy.

Shares of radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications Inc. (NYSE: CCU) were slightly up in early trading after the company posted higher first-quarter profit boosted in part by gains in its outdoor advertising unit. Though, the company was not able to beat analysts' predictions as the weak economy put pressure on the overall advertising market.

Clear Channel Communications announced that its quarterly profit surged to $799.7 million, or $1.61 per share. The income figures were definitely something to cheer about. During its first quarter last year, the company had net income of $102.2 million or 21 cents per share. Excluding one-time items, earnings for the quarter would have been $0.19 per share. Analysts' forecast (which typically exclude one-time items) was for $0.21 per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

The media and advertising display company also said that quarterly revenue rose 3.9% to $1.56 billion, compared with $1.51 billion reported in the same period a year ago, helped by favorable foreign exchange rates; excluding the effect of the week dollar, revenue rose only 1%. Analysts had been expecting to see slower sales of $1.53 billion.

I just finished reading a lively little blog piece furnished by The New York Times, City Room. It would seem that the cute Green NYC logo has come under scrutiny of the corporate lawyers at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). Let me just start this by saying it's my opinion that on it's face, this complaint by Apple is stupid. If this sort of thing is what it takes to keep Apple's corporate lawyers busy, the company has far too many law-schooled chair-warmers on payroll.

I won't even dissect the logo issue here for you; I'd pale in comparison to the New York Times piece. What I'd like to do is offer my services to the Apple Inc. legal department as "Solicitor for Stupid Litigation Options." I have prepared a portfolio of possible litigation opportunities. I offer it in lieu of a resume.

First, Apple should file suit against the writers of the Bible. How dare those scribes make the apple to appear such a nefarious fruit. Wasn't Eve told that someday the apple would be a symbol of universal knowledge? Umm wait, I think God did tell her that. So that means we could argue that she acted with malice of intent when she asked Adam to take a bite from the future corporate logo. However, she might then file a counterclaim against Apple, citing her first precedent use of the bitten fruit symbol. We'll have to find mitigating circumstances.

In what may end up being a net positive for eBay, albeit possibly an expensive one, a settlement has been reached in the litigation over patent infringement between eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) and MercExchange. Financial figures of the settlement have not been disclosed, but a report from Computerworld indicates that eBay shall purchase the three patents which were the subject of the litigation, as well as a number of other related technologies and developments.

Mike Jacobson, eBay senior vice president and general counsel, was quoted by Computerworld as stating: "In addition to resolving the litigation, this settlement gives us access to additional intellectual property that will help improve and further secure our marketplaces." MercExchange founder and CEO Thomas Woolston, is quoted in the same report as stating: "It seemed like the right time to put it behind us."

In May of 2003, a jury in the case found eBay guilty of patent infringement and an injunction was sought and granted. However, in reviewing the US Court of Appeals decision, the Supreme Court unanimously derailed the long standing practice of issuing immediate injunctions in cases of intellectual property infringement, insisting that in the future, such injunctions must meet the requirements of a four-factor test.

Back on May 17, 2007, there was another typical multi-billion dollar private equity deal. That is, The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE: BX) agreed to pay $81.75 per share -- a total of $7.8 billion -- for Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS).

In the press release, Chip Schorr, a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, proclaimed: "We are excited about the opportunity to work together with management and with Alliance Data's dedicated employees to help continue to grow the business and further strengthen the company's competitive position."

Well, now the deal is in shambles, with ADS's stock price trading at a lowly $41.40. This week, Blackstone indicated that it is having troubles getting regulatory approval from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC), which wants Blackstone to provide a $400 million backstop of support (in the event there is a problem with the banking segment).

If you've seen Borat, you probably remember the scene: Borat, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, goes to a driving school and takes a driving lesson. During the lesson, he makes ethnic slurs, discusses the relative brain size of women, drives on the wrong side of the road, and offers the driver of a passing car money to "make sexy time".

Well now the driver's ed coach, Michael Psenicska, is suing the filmmakers, saying that they misrepresented the nature of the film when he signed the waiver.

He's asking for $100,000 and frankly, given the success of the film and his fairly prominent role in it (the straight man in a pretty long scene), it seems like a reasonable request.

And do the filmmakers really think that describing Borat as a documentary about the integration of foreign people into the American way of life is a fair and complete description?

Just give the guy his $100,000. It's fair.

Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) is facing a number of lawsuits that say its painkiller Celebrex can cause heart attacks. Yesterday, a court threw some of those cases out. The Wall Street Journal wrote "U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco ruled that plaintiffs in the litigation haven't presented scientifically reliable evidence that Celebrex caused heart attacks or strokes when taken at a daily dosage of 200 milligrams." Pfizer says that the 200 milligram dose is the one most commonly given.

The cases involving Celebrex include over 3,000 plantiffs, and some are suing about effects of the drug at a higher dose, but the ruling is still a considerable relief for the big pharma company.

Like most drug liability cases, this one hinges on whether Pfizer knew that there were risks that the drug could cause significant problems beyond those disclosed on the labels. In that case, the amount of the dose would seem to be academic, especially for anyone who became sick.

But the court may have more wisdom than Wall Street and some plaintiffs will go unrewarded. As the tobacco companies proved two decades ago, suing big business rarely yields much reward.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

I'm fascinated by the recent attempt of Australia's Virgin Mobile to apply the internet's unruly, free-for-all mindset on the real bricks and mortar world. If you missed it, Virgin used royalty-free images from Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)'s photo-hosting site Flickr in a print ad campaign, and subsequently faces some courtroom headaches.

Now comes the equally engaging inverse of that case -- a situation that could be woven only on the web. Popular technology blog TechCrunch has been threatened with litigation seeking $1.5 million, accused of misappropriating this professional photo of Ashton Kutcher, the actor and host of MTV's Punk'd.

What's the evidence? This Google search, apparently. Go ahead -- click the search. Assuming Google hasn't switched things around on us, the, uh, dreamy beefcake shot in question should show up at the top, promoting Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s image search (by the way, when did the great Googly Moogly start returning "Extra Large Images"? I gotta keep up).

If you click on Ashton's shiny, hairless torso, you'll be taken to this TechCrunch post, regarding the voice-over-IP gizmo Ooma (bewilderingly, Demi Moore's main man-boy is Ooma's creative director). Clicking on a Google image-search result typically takes you to the web page where you can see the picture in context.

Damning evidence? Here's where it gets interesting, at least for those of us whose job duties include ritual prayers to Google -- TechCrunch never actually used the photo. What has the photographer's agency all litigation-happy actually stems from Google's rocket science.

Apparently, a sass-talking TechCrunch reader, in responding to the Ooma post, included a link to the offending photo of Kutcher -- just a link, mind you, not the image itself. In indexing the TechCrunch post, Google's search math processed the linked image and associated it with the TechCrunch post (the ones and zeros at work are somewhat related to Google bombing -- if you're unfamiliar, here's a rundown of the most notorious incident thereof).

The photographer's agency had best walk away from this one -- it has no case. Or maybe Ashton's really Punk'ng TechCrunch, and this is all a brilliant promotion as part of his duties as Ooma's creative director. After all, had you heard about Ooma before?

UPDATE: It figures -- the Google search now links Kutcher's photo to this Yahoo! Answers page -- I guess it's their headache now. Learn more at TechCrunch's post.

Texas must hate successful internet giants. At least, that is what one must think after two sets of goofy, litigious lawsuits were brought against Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo!, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) in the last two months. On top of the Polaris lawsuit from a few months ago that accused the internet giants of violating its email filtering patent, Performance Pricing, Inc. (from Austin, Texas) now says that the three internet giants, along with AOL, LLC (part of Time Warner, Inc. (NYSE: TWX)) have violated patents related to -- get this -- a "transaction system."

Apparently some smaller firms have made it a point to make money not with innovation and marketing, but from trying to patent basic business practices and processes. This time around, these four companies have been charged with using Performance Pricing's technology "in methods and systems that they make, use, sell and offer to sell."

Is having a website that transacts business with customers a process that is patentable? I'm waiting for Performance Pricing to sue the other hundred million website operators who transact business with customers. Excuse me while I twiddle my thumbs here.

Is this "technology" even patentable? My guess is that the U.S. patent in question, 6,978,253, described as "Systems and Methods for Transacting Business Over a Global Communications Network such as the Internet" will be laughed out of court once it reaches that stage. Performance Pricing has requested a jury trial.

There's an old saying about getting into a fight with a lady: "If you lose you lose, and if you win you lose."

Well, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has won a battle with a 30-year old single mother from Minnesota. A federal jury ordered the woman the woman to pay $222,000 in damages for sharing 24 songs on online file-sharing platform Kazaa -- That's $9,250 per song.

"She was in tears. She's devastated," the woman's attorney attorney, Brian Toder, told The Associated Press. "This is a girl that lives from paycheck to paycheck, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheck garnished for the rest of her life."

The actual judgment could come in closer to half a million dollars, because she will also have to pay the RIAA's attorney's fees.

While this is an important symbolic victory for the industry, you have to hope that they will let this poor woman off the hook. In addition to its financial struggles, the industry is also reeling from angry consumers and upset artists. Demonstrating some compassion toward a single mother could go a long way towards building some goodwill.

But if the industry does decide to play hardball with this woman, they may find out that, in the long run, this victory is actually a major loss.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has overcome some legal hurdles in the U.S. in recent years (and has been slammed as well), but the world's largest software maker continues to see complete opposition from its European Union buddies (heh), as evidenced by last week's ruling. It's tough these days for regulatory governments and agencies not to have a say in the role of high-tech now that the sector is one of the world's largest. The largest kid on the block is always (always) the biggest target. Think about Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) for another example.

In many cases, in the name of "protecting consumers" the stepped-up efforts to curb certain practices end up hurting future innovation, a fact proved over and over in history but shunned by lawmaking bodies consumed with a play for power and the banishment of a main tenet of capitalism -- staying the heck out of the way and letting market forces define equilibrium. But, the equilibrium can be tilted with corporate abuse and monopolistic practices, and so government and private enterprise enter into a grudge match. It's very accusatory, and generally a very expensive process for both sides.

Should the EU examine Microsoft, it would see that the software giant is under attack now more than ever, even as it continues raking in growth and profits every quarter. There are so many alternatives to many of Microsoft's products it could boggle anyone's mind. Who legislates this kind of sea-change as it happens? Customers and market forces, of course. Microsoft was found guilty of anti-competitive practices, which is a fact. It's still vulnerable from being popped off its perch.

Everything from open-source web server software to free operating system and office productivity packages will challenge (oops, is challenging) Microsoft like never before, and the company up for the fight of its life. That's what capitalism is: creating competition by taking power away from government and letting the principles of economics take over. In Microsoft's case, it's unfortunately not that easy when it comes to the EU.

[Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 9-24-07]

I could swear securities lawyers have invented a sophisticated computer program capable of seeking out public companies to target with class-action lawsuits. A company reports a bad quarter, the stock tanks, and then for the next few weeks, press releases seem to come out daily announcing a class-action lawsuit "commenced ... on behalf of purchasers of ... stock issued pursuant or traceable to the false and misleading Registration Statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the Company's ... initial public stock offering."

The press release will then mention some important dates and vague accusations of securities fraud.

Heelys Inc. (NASDAQ: HLYS) the maker of the annoying skate shoes that so many young kids are wearing is the latest target of these lawsuits. Take a look:

• Brower Piven announces...
• Lerach Coughlin announces...
• Schatz Nobel Izard announces...
• Howard G. Smith announces... This prestigious firm even gives you an e-mail address if you have any questions: howardsmithlaw@hotmail.com (emphasis added).

These firms put out the press releases in an effort to find plaintiffs, and then hope to get the cases to discovery so they can fish for signs of wrongdoing.

It's been a tough fight for the buyout of EGL Inc. (NASDAQ: EAGL). Apollo Management and the company's CEO, James Crane, have been bidding against each other for the past five months or so.

But it looks like we have a deal. That is, EGL has agreed to a $2 billion offer from Apollo.

Making things easier, Apollo also owns Ceva. As a result, the combined EGL-Ceva will create a much bigger logistics company.

However, Crane is not giving up. If you check out a filing with the SEC, top executives at EGL are alleging that another executive provided confidential information to Apollo.

Well, litigation is pretty common in such things. So, I suspect we'll see a complaint filed.

But, in the end, Apollo had a higher price and that should mean the deal will finally get done.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

The Alien Tort Statute dates to George Washington's era. Today, however, it worries some executives in charge of global operations. Their concern: the 18th-century law could make contemporary business liable at home for the bad behavior of their employees around the globe.

Are violence and murder part of global business? Some overseas labor leaders say yes, and they're suing American companies in U.S. courts. Several lawsuits alleging violation of the revolutionary era law are awaiting trial in federal courts, according to an article in USA Today.

"The lawsuits have set up a showdown over whether boardrooms in the USA should pay big-money verdicts for crimes not prosecuted in countries where corruption and violence are often seen as a cost of doing business," writes Alan Gomez.

Back in December, Sabre Holdings (NYSE: TSG) announced a $4.45 billion buyout. The buyers included Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group (TPG). The price tag was a 30% premium over the past 60 trading days.

As almost ways happens, Sabre got served. There was a class-action suit as well as a derivative action lawsuit.

Did it increase the stock price? No.

But I'm sure it was lucrative for the attorneys.

This week, Sabre settled the litigation. Yes, this is something that seems to always happen. The suits are often nuisances and need to get cleared up before a deal gets done.

Although, one of the suits resulted in a reduction for the termination fee payble for TPG and Silver Lake. The fee will drop from $135 million to $80.

That's certainly a positive.

But, for the most part, I think these suits are really a nice gig for plaintiffs attorneys to rack up the fees. Add 'em to the big list of beneficiaries of the boom in private equity.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.