The $105 million lawsuit againt NBC's civil rights-defying pedophile roundup To Catch a Predator has been settled out of court. When reached for comment, a fake 14-year-old named Kiki said her parents were out of town for the weekend and that she had some liquor.

In defending the website cumonherface.com from obscenity charges, attorneys are leaning on Google Trends to prove their case. What can make porn illegal — being classified as obscene material, for one — is its bucking of "community standards of decency." This is just the first instance of lawyers showing up in court with some Google-gleaned data to demonstrate that curiosity about ejaculation in and around the cheeks and mouth is as American as apple pie.

Hookers and eBay, shares and cops. If Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, had an attorney on staff with them, would that have prevented questionable legal moves by the founder and CEO of the world's most reliable housemates and hookups platform?

A California appeals court ruled yesterday that your job has no right to obtain your work emails or text messages if they are stored by a third party provider. That means that the roughly 30% of Microsoft Outlook users whose emails are handled by a vendor, for example, would be protected from having their employers snoop on them. If your job stores employee emails internally, they can still read them. Regardless, this is good news for leakers in this age of corporate snooping on your Facebook pages. Who do you have to thank for this newfound privacy? A cop who sent sexy text messages from his work phone!:

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins was sued by prison inmate Jonathan Lee Riches, who wanted $43 million from Khosla because "Khosla’s fund invests in prison buildings," among other concerns. Riches has also sued former Giants slugger Barry Bonds and hundreds of other celebrities, inspiring Khosla to quip, "Well, there is at least one thing I have in common with Britney Spears and Perez Hilton now." [Private Equity Hub] (Photos by AP/John Raoux, Rolando Aviles, Jack Plunkett)

Former Page Six gossip Jared Paul Stern famously lost his job when he was accused of trying to extort zillionaire supermarket magnate Ron Burkle. No charges were ever filed. So Jared filed a defamation suit against Burkle—and Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Secret Service agent Frank Renzi, flack Mike Sitrick, and Daily News reporter William Sherman. Bad news, Stern fans: a judge has dismissed the suit. He dismissed it with great prejudice and even a little literary criticism. "A New York State Supreme Court justice trashed Jared Paul Stern's lawsuit in his decision, saying it read more like a 'Mickey Spillane novel' than a carefully argued statement of law." Ouch. James Cain—or even Jim Thompson!—would be one thing, but you really don't want your legal brief reading as ham-fisted as a Mike Hammer book. Is this the end of little Jared? No. No, it is not.

You can look at Wendy Williams, the loud queen of hip hop talk radio, in two ways: she is popular, in the sense that her show is still one of the biggest things on the radio dial; but she's also not popular, in the sense that her crazy husband runs around her studio hiring hitmen, sexually harassing the female employees, and generally acting like a gangster, according to a new lawsuit from a traumatized publicist. Williams denies it all, including the claim that her husband slammed her up against the wall because she failed to stop smoking. But one thing she can't deny: she is mean. In 2006 she told everybody on air about how Wu-Tang rapper Method Man's wife had cancer—which was private. Method Man responded with one of the most sincere anti-gossip rants in recent history:

The UK's stupid libel laws allow people to successfully sue the media for making fun of them. So Robert Dee, a 21-year-old British guy who is the world's Worst Professional Tennis Player, is suing three newspapers there for pointing out that he is, in fact, the Worst Professional Tennis Player. Mainly, this makes us glad to be in America, where we're free to tell you that Robert Dee is the Worst Professional Tennis Player. But also, the facts aren't even on his side; it sure sounds like he really is the Worst Professional Tennis Player!:

A group of Yahoo shareholders don't think Yahoo needs to be such a great place for employees to be laid off from. Lawyers representing the two Detroit police and firefighter pension plans that are suing Yahoo over its failed merger negotiations with Microsoft filed a brief demanding Yahoo rescind an employee severance package the lawyers and corporate raider Carl Icahn say dampened Microsoft's interest in a merger. The lawyers asked the lawsuit's presiding judge to hold a hearing to determine the severance package's fate ahead of Yahoo's August 1 shareholder meeting. (Photo by gruntzooki)

Let the lamb and rice platters flow! Street vendor Tony Dragonas, whose militantly-beloved cart at 62nd and Madison has been sating Upper East Siders for 25 years, is not getting put out of business by the city. The neighborhood icon has settled a lawsuit with the Department of Health, putting to bed the 19 $1,000-a-pop health code violations that threatened to sink him. Area residents who normally don't display an iota of concern for the woes of the working-class mounted a vigorous defense of Tony, signing a "Save Tony Petition" in droves; a dozen diehards even showed up at his trial in the financial district yesterday to testify on his behalf. A heartwarming victory for the little guy, greasy chicken, and even greasier (but supposedly delicious) hamburgers.

Mark Hornick, the lawyer representing ConnectU's Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the "smoking gun" chat transcripts that data forensics expert Jeff Parmet may or may not have discovered on hard drives subpoenaed from Facebook implicating Mark Zuckerberg in grand theft source code: "We don't have them. The courts have them, Facebook has them, but ConnectU doesn't have them." [Silicon Alley Insider]

The ConnectU founders have long argued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used code commissioned by ConnectU, a rival college-based social network, to create Facebook at Harvard. Now, after agreeing to a settlement with Facebook in February, the ConnectU founders want out of the deal. They say instant messaging files found on Facebook's computers offer new "smoking-gun" evidence to make their case.

In the same way that child molesters gravitate toward jobs that put them into contact with kids, sexual harassers seem to gravitate toward jobs that put them into contact with... women who've dedicated their careers to fighting sexual harassment. Jack Tuckner, a founding partner of the womens-rights law firm Tuckner Sipser Weinstein & Sipser, is being sued for sexual harassment by the firm's former office manager, Lisa Brockington. The lewd litigator's skeevy antics allegedly included boasting to Brockington about his pierced dong, wearing a bondage collar on the job, and displaying a screensaver that showed him kneeled at the feet of a dominatrix; he also talked Brockington up to his co-workers as "the ultimate shiksa." Ironically, Brockington's charges actually bolster Tuckner's assertion on his website, womensrightsny.com, that he's an "expert on sexual harassment.

Welcome to Hollywood, kid! Hairspray star Nikki Blonsky's meteoric trajectory from no-name Long Islander to Golden Globe-nominated movie star struck its inevitable litigation point Tuesday, when her former managers sued her and her mother for a cut of her earnings from the 2007 hit. Margaret Karaszek and Michael Ostrowski allege they're entitled to a "standard 20 percent cut for helping Blonsky land the role," reports Newsday, which adds that Blonksy nabbed the part of Tracy Turnblad six months after her contract expired with the partners. They say the Blonskys verbally re-upped for two years; a judge, meanwhile declined the Blonsky request to dismiss the case on the grounds that Karaszek and Ostrowski aren't entitled to anything without agent licenses. We give them one week to a settlement, which we predict Blonsky will obligingly pay off by working just one more summer at her old Cold Stone Creamery in Great Neck. [Newsday via People]

Ben Karlin, the funnyman former Daily Show producer who is, unfortunately, kind of a dick, is currently suing some company over a book about Spain. Mario Batali is involved, too. What in the world is Ben Karlin doing working on a book about Spain, which does not appear to be a comedy project? We don't know, but it sure sounds like the guy is (wisely) just signing up for any old book that'll cut him a check:

The complaint in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo unsealed yesterday reads like a whodunit. But my favorite part of the mystery are notes from the call Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on January 31, the night before Ballmer took Microsoft's merger bid public. At one point, Yang pleads: "You don't lose anything by waiting a week." Ballmer saw right through Yang's delay tactics, saying there was no point in waiting if Yang didn't want to sell the company. See the exchange and the rest of the suit filing embedded below.

If Yahoo outsources search to Google, Microsoft will come screaming to antitrust regulators. How will Microsoft lawyers make their case? They'll let Yahoo docs do the talking. Before Yahoo was for outsourcing its search to Google, Yahoo was against outsourcing its search to Google. To explain why, Yahoo execs prepared a document for an all-hands meeting to be held on January 30. The document is part of the complaint a judge presiding over a shareholder suit against Yahoo released to the public yesterday. It reads:

A judge has unsealed documents in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reports, and the allegations, now posted online, are explosive. Chiefly, that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at $40 a share in January 2007. Then-CEO Terry Semel turned Microsoft down, seeking to strike a commercial partnership instead. Slow progress in negotiating that deal made Microsoft executives impatient, leading to its unsolicited bid at $31 a share. While the plaintiffs, two Michigan pension funds, are presenting that history, it actually explains much about Yahoo's resistance to Microsoft's recent advances.

Alan Schnurman, the lawyer representing Fox News bedbug victim Jane Clark, explains the origin of the infestation: "My position is that it comes from foreigners...Because it became so inexpensive for foreigners to travel here, I believe they brought it into our hotel system." God, we knew it was a bad sign he called his client "Joan" yesterday. Just show the pictures and keep your mouth shut, Schnurman! You'll ruin everything! [NYO]

Jane Clark, the former Fox News employee who is now suing the company that managed the network's bedbug-infested headquarters, had a press conference today where she showed off the results of her vicious multiple bitings at the hands of the bloodthirsty insects. Take heed, potential Fox News guests: this may be the fate that awaits you! Two more graphic photos of Clark's welt-ridden neck, after the jump.