Activist groups sued Viacom Inc. on Thursday, claiming the parent of Comedy Central improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the cable network's "The Colbert Report."

Viacom responded by saying it had no records of ever making such a request.

Although the video in question contained clips taken from the television show, MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films LLC argued that their use was protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

With Viacom identified by YouTube as the source of the removal request, they said Viacom should have known the use was legal and thus its complaint to YouTube to have the video blocked amounted to a "misrepresentation" that is subject to damages under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The challenge, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, came about a week after Viacom filed its own, $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, claiming that the wildly popular Web site is rife with copyrighted video from Viacom shows, including "The Colbert Report."

Neither YouTube nor its parent, Google Inc., was named in the latest lawsuit, filed on the plaintiffs' behalf by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

In a letter to the plaintiffs' lawyers, Michael D. Fricklas, general counsel for Viacom, said the company had no record of sending YouTube a complaint, despite YouTube's identification of Viacom as the source. YouTube had no comment about the discrepancy.

The expulsions will be erased from the record and the students will be allowed to make up for missed work. Two of them still must write letters of apology to a teacher named in the movie and his wife.

In the movie, the "teddy bear master" orders stuffed animals to kill a teacher who had embarrassed him, but students battle the toy beasts, according to documents filed in court.

School officials last year expelled the four students who made the film, arguing that it was disruptive and they saw it as a threat to Knightstown Intermediate School teacher Dan Clevenger.

Two of the students sued, claiming their free-speech rights were violated. A federal judge in December ordered that school officials allow them back into class, saying that although the students should apologize for the "humiliating" and "obscene" movie, district officials had not proven that the work disrupted school.

A third student joined the lawsuit after it was filed, and the fourth student did not challenge the expulsion.

Superintendent David McGuire said the school district's insurance company will cover the cost of the $69,000 settlement that will be split among the plaintiffs.

U.S. Chief District Judge Claire Eagan vacated the jury‘s ruling against Ford and ordered the case retried beginning July 16.

Brewster said Wednesday that Eagan‘s basis for the decision involved matters that Ford‘s attorneys didn‘t object to during the trial.

After a trial on the merits, for the reasons that follow, notwithstanding the compelling interest of Congress in protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web, I conclude today that COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) at least some of the plaintiffs have standing; (2) COPA is not narrowly tailored to Congress’ compelling interest; (3) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive, most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest; and (4) COPA is vague and overbroad. As a result, I will issue a permanent injunction against the enforcement of COPA.

The US Supreme Court in 2004 upheld a temporary injunction against the enforcement of COPA in Ashcroft v. ACLU, holding that COPA would likely violate the First Amendment, and remanded the case back to the District Court. Judge Reed presided over a four-week trial on the merits which concluded in November 2006.

COPA was enacted in 1998 after similar provisions contained in the Communications Decency Act (CDA) were struck down in Reno v. ACLU as unconstitutional because it was not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest and because less restrictive alternatives were available. Last year, Google fought a Justice Department subpoena seeking to force the search engine giant to hand over a large amount of user data, including one week's worth of query searches and up to 1 million web addresses as part of a federal effort to rewrite COPA. 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed the conviction and sentence of a former Republican National Committee official accused in a phone-jamming plot on Election Day 2002.

James Tobin, the former regional chairman of President Bush ‘s re-election campaign, w, , ) defeated then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for the Senate that day.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the statute under which Tobin was convicted "is not a close fit" for what Tobin did and questioned whether the government showed that Tobin intended to harass. A Justice Department spokesman said prosecutors were reviewing the decision, and did not say if they planned to appeal.

Messages seeking comment were left with Tobin and his attorneys.

At the time of the alleged phone jamming, Tobin was a regional official with the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, overseeing Senate campaigns in several states, including New Hampshire and Maine. He went on to serve as President Bush‘s New England re-election campaign chairman in 2004, but resigned after the phone-jamming allegations surfaced.

Tobin was convicted of putting the executive director of the state‘s Republican Party in touch with the head of a Virginia-based telemarketing firm, who hired another telemarketing firm to place the hundreds of hang-up calls. A co-owner of that firm at the time, Shaun Hansen, of Spokane, Wash., pleaded guilty in November to a conspiracy charge and to making the calls and awaits sentencing.

During arguments, the Missouri Attorney General argued that while the prosecutor's statements may have been improper, they did not influence the fairness of the guilt phase of Weaver's trial. Justice Souter seemed to agree with Weaver's counsel, indicating that some of the statements made by the prosecutor had no relationship to the facts and evidence presented during Weaver's trial; Justice Scalia noted that the guilt and sentencing phases of trials are "quite different."

A U.S. judge has thrown out a lawsuit challenging the fairness of how Web search leader Google Inc. calculates the popularity of Web sites in determining search results, court papers show.

In a ruling issued Friday that came to light Tuesday, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a lawsuit against Google by parenting information site KinderStart.

The judge also imposed yet-to-be-determined sanctions on KinderStart legal counsel Gregory Yu for making unsupported allegations against Google.

KinderStart sued Google in March 2006 alleging the Mountain View, California-based Internet company had defamed the site by cutting it from its Web search ranking system.

The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company, which features links to information about raising children, accused Google of violations of antitrust, free speech, unfair competition and defamation and libel laws.

In its suit, the company argued its site's sudden demotion in March 2005 to a "zero" ranking in Google's search system had severely harmed its business.

KinderStart had sought class action status on behalf of what is said were many other sites that suffered the same fate as Google fine-tunes Web site rankings in search results.

"KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement ... as distinguished from an unfavorable opinion about KinderStart.com's importance," the judge's ruling states.

In addition, the judge said the plaintiff's counsel should have removed allegations that Google discriminated against or manipulated its Web search rankings after the judge ordered the lawyer to do so in an interim ruling.

"While Yu has brought a novel challenge to a major corporation, it is apparent that to some extent he has overreached in doing so," Fogel said. "Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence."

The judge granted Google the right to seek attorneys fees for the costs of defending against these specific charges. Both sides have 14 days to file motions before the judge determines monetary damages against Yu.

Yu is with the firm Global Law Group of San Mateo.

"All options are being explored. That's all that we are going to say at this point," he told Reuters, but declined to describe his plans further.

A Google attorney said the company felt vindicated.

"We always felt these claims were unjustified, because courts have consistently rejected complaints over search engine rankings, so we're pleased that Judge Fogel promptly dismissed this case," Google litigation counsel Hilary Ware said in a company statement.