The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Jain of a decision against him from the Washington state Court of Appeals.

Jain and his wife Anuradha had accused J.P. Morgan Securities, Inc.; its lawyer, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C., and Perkins Coie — which jointly represented Jain and Bellevue, Wash.,-based InfoSpace from 1998 to mid-2003 — of being responsible for language in InfoSpace's initial public offering prospectus that contained errors, which ultimately played a part in the $247 million judgment against Jain.

The Jains settled the lawsuit for $105 million.

The Jains accused the securities professionals of negligence. But lower courts have thrown out the Jains' complaints, saying federal law prohibits lawsuits blaming security companies for risky trades.

InfoSpace was founded by Jain in 1996 as an online e-mail directory, went public two years later and grew into an Internet and wireless services juggernaut. Jain claimed InfoSpace would become the world's first company worth a trillion dollars, but it lost more than $30 billion in shareholder value during the dot-com bust and Jain was fired in late 2002.

The case is Naveen Jain and Anuradha Jain v. J.P. Morgan Securities, Inc.; Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C.; and Perkins Coie, 08-838.

In a transcript of a June court hearing that was closed to the public, lawyers arguing over a legal settlement revealed Facebook's own appraisal had priced its privately held stock at $8.88 per share, giving it a market value of about $3.7 billion.

The Palo Alto-based company relied on the appraisal to value employee stock options fairly and avert possible tax problems.

Facebook, which runs the Internet's largest social network, made the assessment after striking an October 2007 deal with Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. As part of a broader advertising partnership with Microsoft, Facebook agreed to sell a 1.6 percent stake to the software maker for $240 million.

The Microsoft investment implied Facebook's stock was worth $35.90 per share — a figure that was relied upon in the settlement of a lawsuit that accused the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of stealing the idea for his online hangout from three former classmates who started another social network called ConnectU.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt declined to comment on any of the figures obtained from the court documents. Microsoft had no immediate comment.

In last June's court hearing, Facebook's lawyers argued the company's appraisal of its common stock couldn't be held up as an apples-to-apples comparison with the Microsoft investment because the software maker bought Series D preferred stock. Microsoft also had an incentive to pay a premium for Facebook's stock because it wanted to deepen its ties to the company's popular Web site, whose worldwide audience of 150 million people could eventually attract billions of dollars in advertising.

Analysts believe Facebook generated somewhere between $250 million and $300 million in revenue last year.

Lawyers opposing Facebook said the company cited the $35.90 per share figure in the settlement negotiations.

The spending plans were outlined in a regulatory filing that also provided some clues about the magnitude of a recent payroll purge targeting Google's legion of contractors and other workers who aren't considered full-time or part-time employees.

The filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission was submitted on Dec. 15, but it was made on paper, leaving it unavailable through the various Web services that track reports to the agency. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the records this week.

A key section of the filing is being kept confidential because Google maintains it contains trade secrets, but the publicly accessible parts provide some information that hadn't previously been disclosed.

For instance, Google revealed it currently has 24,400 employees, including 4,300 interns, temporary workers and contractors. That contrasts sharply with the roughly 10,000 contractors that Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company had in October. "It's really high," Brin said in an Oct. 16 interview with the San Jose Mercury News.

Google acknowledged in late November that it planned to significantly reduce the number of its contractors and retain all of its full-time employees.

But the company wouldn't specify how many of the temporary workers were being dumped, feeding rampant speculation among bloggers and even industry analysts. Published estimates of the cost-cutting's impact ranged from a few hundred to all 10,000 of Google's contractors.

The settlement approved by Chancellor William Chandler III calls for Gupta to reimburse $9 million to the company. Gupta also will step down as chief executive officer and receive a $10 million severance package.

The settlement includes a host of corporate governance changes, including the resignations of three directors and the establishment of an internal watchdog to prevent further abuses.

Gupta remains a 40 percent shareholder in Omaha, Neb.-based InfoGroup, which is the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. But the settlement prohibits him from trying to wage a proxy contest before 2010 or trying to undo the corporate reforms being put in place before 2013.

A special litigation committee formed in response to the lawsuit confirmed many of the findings by the plaintiffs, who alleged that the company had paid Gupta millions of dollars for personal expenses including jet travel, homes, a yacht, and a collection of luxury automobiles that, as the judge wrote last year, "would leave James Bond green with envy."

The unanimous ruling Friday reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world's most prolific spammers. The court agreed with Jeremy Jaynes' claim that the anti-spam law violates free speech protections under the First Amendment.

In 2004, Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.

What is being dubbed here as "the iPod tax" has been tossed around for years. The tax would allow about 1 percent to 3 percent of the price of a digital recording device to go to recording companies, songwriters and artists.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs had hoped to submit legislation to Parliament as early as this fall.

But amid a flurry of criticism from electronics makers, a meeting of a panel studying the proposal failed to reach any agreement Thursday, agency official Masafumi Kiyota said.

"At this point, there is virtually no hope for getting the legislation passed," he said.

The panel agreed to continue talking, but no date has been set, Kiyota said.

Despite an aggressive push by the Japanese recording industry, a similar proposal to impose an "iPod tax" fell apart in December 2005.

The cultural agency proposed a compromise in May to charge only portable digital music players, such as iPods, and digital hard disk recorders. But the manufacturers resisted, saying more equipment could be added as a source for royalties.

Older devices, such as minidisk and DVD recorders, are already subject to copyright fees in Japan. The payments are included in the price tag so most shoppers aren't even aware they're paying it.

The Motion Picture Association of America has helped convict an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, a peer-to-peer site, of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

Daniel Dove, 26, of Clintwood, Va., was the first criminal conviction after jury trial for peer-to-peer copyright infringement and the eighth overall resulting from a federal crackdown called Operation D-Elite that targeted administrators and people who provided content that was distributed through the BitTorrents hub.

The case began in 2005, when federal agents raided and shut down the popular Web site that had distributed copyrighted music and movies, including Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. At that time, Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server.

According to prosecutors, EliteTorrents attracted more than 125,000 members and assisted in the illegal distribution of about 700 movies, which were downloaded more than 1.1 million times. According to the Justice Department, Dove led a group of "uploaders" that supplied pirated content to the group, as well as recruiting members with ultra-fast broadband connections to become uploaders. Prosecutors also said Dove operated a high-speed server himself.

The MPAA "provided substantial assistance" to the investigation, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Dove faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in September, the Justice Department said.

Scott McCausland, who used to be an administrator of the EliteTorrents server before the raid, pleaded guilty in 2006 to two copyright-related charges over the uploading of Star Wars: Episode III to the Internet. As a result, he was sentenced to five months in jail and five months' home confinement.