Throughout the day today I'll be presenting a brief overview of some current happenings in IT litigation; interesting issues continue to be explored by various legislatures, and there are an increasing number of IP/IT cases being heard in Appeal Courts. My Applied Mathematics lecture was cancelled without notice this morning, so I have 3 hours of waiting around until my next lecture. It's the last day before the mid-term break, too...on with the news!

First off, a lawsuit over a power of ten: the definition of 'gigabyte' is being challenged in a class-action law suit against several high-profile hard drive manufacturers. The plaintiffs claim they were mislead into believing that a hard disk's capacity was measured in lots of 1024MB, instead of the actual 1000MB - the 'marketing gigabyte' long abhored by computer enthusiasts - and seek an injunction against the 'purportedly unfair marketing practices'.

This is actually a bigger concern than it sounds, with larger hard drives having their sizes reduced by as much as 10GB owing to the difference in measurement. Of course, I doubt the RIAA would mind too much about consumers' losing out on storage space, which they mustillegal music downloads. Ahem.