You should not be surprised to learn that a federal judge yesterday ordered BlueBeat.com to immediately stop selling Beatles songs and other music from its site, rejecting a goofy assertion that the company had copyrights on the songs via the use of something called “psycho-acoustic simulation.”

The company had been sued by EMI earlier in the week, after it came to light that BlueBeat had been selling Beatles tracks and other music for 25 cents a track, and offering free streaming of albums from the Fab Four and other groups. To date, no online music site has the rights to sell or stream the Beatles music.

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The same federal judge who oversaw the Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing trial earlier this year passed out default judgments this week against other file-swappers who never bothered to show up–and they now owe far less than Tenenbaum.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation’s attention when they were defendants in the RIAA’s first two trials against accused online infringers. But here’s the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court.

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Copyright filtering technology is a form of copyright infringement, according to a lawsuit against document service Scribd.

The lawsuit, lodged in a Texas federal court Friday, broaches a novel legal theory in which the U.S. courts have never squarely decided.

The suit maintains that the copying and insertion of a copyrighted work into a filtering system without compensating the copyright holder, or obtaining their consent, is a violation of the Copyright Act. The case comes as copyright filtering technology is quickly becoming a behind-the-scenes feature on university sites, user-generated content sites and online social networking venues.

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Apple (AAPL) employees will have to go that extra 12 miles for their employers after all.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken recently denied a request from the Cupertino, Calif., company to transfer an unusual lawsuit it faces to a federal judge in San Jose, Calif.

Apple argued the move would make for a more convenient trek–about 88 miles round trip when leaving Apple HQ–for Apple employees involved in the case.

Lawyers for OdioWorks, which is suing Apple, characterized its legal foes’ request as an “attempt to undermine the assignment procedure” that paired the lawsuit with a judge in the Oakland courthouse. Last week, Judge Wilken set aside Apple’s request without comment, thus leaving the 100-mile round trip commute between Cupertino and her courtroom in Oakland in place.

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Three times in the last month, government agencies have targeted Google (GOOG) for antitrust reviews. An outstanding private lawsuit alleges that Google tried to kill a business-to-business search engine with predatory pricing.

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During the 2006 Winter Olympics, blogger Sean Healy had some pointed criticism of the mother of athlete Shani Davis.

In a post dated Feb. 26, 2006, Healy allegedly wrote that Cherie Davis, the mother of the black speed skating champion, had criticized members of the speed skating federation as white supremacists and neo-Nazi genetic mutations. Healy made the statements about Cherie Davis on his blog, Unknown Column, hosted via Google’s Blogger service.

Last week, Cherie Davis filed a lawsuit in Cook County, Ill. against Google (GOOG), demanding the company remove the post. Davis brought the case against Google and not Healy because he died of cancer in April 2007.

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A federal judge dismissed a Pittsburgh couple’s suit against Google (GOOG), rejecting their claim that the Internet giant’s Street View feature violated their privacy.

Google Maps’s Street View, which launched in 2007, shows street-level maps of some cities. The couple, Christine and Aaron Boring, sued Google in April (our Law Blog colleagues wrote about it), accusing it of negligence, unjust enrichment and trespassing, in addition to privacy violation, because photos of their home appeared in Street View.

The judge, Amy Hay, said in her ruling that “While it is easy to imagine that many whose property appears on Google’s virtual maps resent the privacy implications, it is hard to believe that any–other than the most exquisitely sensitive–would suffer shame or humiliation.”

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Another day, another case where someone tried to blame a Web site for the actions of its users. In this case, a guy used the Web site SexSearch (seriously) to find someone to have sex with (ah, the Internet…). The woman he met claimed in her profile that she was 18 years old. In reality, she was apparently only 14–and the guy was eventually brought up on statutory rape charges. In turn, he sued SexSearch, claiming that the site had a responsibility to verify the ages of its users–something he failed to do himself. After a district court ruling tossed out the lawsuit, an appeals court has also tossed out the lawsuit, noting that none of the various 14 claims the guy brought against the site seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Basically, as the judge in the district court noted: “Plaintiff clearly had the ability to confirm Jane Roe’s age when he met with her in person, before they had sex, yet failed to do so.”

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Sellers on eBay (EBAY) can no longer leave negative feedback for buyers, so what are they doing when they’re upset about a buyer’s remarks? Filing lawsuits–at least in the case of Joel Jones. U.K. resident Jones has filed a lawsuit against Chris Read after Read, the winner of Jones’s eBay auction, left negative feedback on the transaction. Jones claims that Read’s feedback is hurting his business and insists on pushing his libel suit unless Read deletes his comments.

The story unfolds exactly as many of us jaded eBay users would expect. Read won an auction being held by Jones for a cellphone, but when he received the item, it wasn’t exactly what he expected. “I was told the phone was in good condition, but there were scratches all over it, a big chip out of the side and it was a different phone. I paid for a Samsung F700 and got a Samsung F700V,” Read told The Telegraph.

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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.

The person suing is the widow of a lawyer/writer, Rex Woodard, and she’s suing all of the band members, with a specific focus on Thomas Gatano DeVito. Woodard’s husband knew the members of The Four Seasons and co-wrote a manuscript biography of DeVito.

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TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.

Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.

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A class-action lawsuit has been launched against domain registrar Network Solutions and ICANN over the controversial practice of domain tasting. The suit was initiated on behalf of Chris McElroy, a search-engine optimization specialist who goes by the handle NameCritic. McElroy has long been an extremely vocal critic of ICANN and is a regular participant on the organization’s mailing lists.

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When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone a little over a year ago, he played up the fact that Apple had filed approximately 200 patents on some of the technologies included in the phone. This seemed a bit surprising because so many of the technologies found in the iPhone were already found elsewhere–just not in as pretty a package. Also, despite all those patent claims, it hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of companies from filing patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple for technologies found in the iPhone.

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