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The outcome of a lawsuit in which a company is suing a former employee over Twitter followers will most likely hinge on how the list was developed and what value each side places on the followers, according to legal experts.

"This case is another example of the application of relatively old legal rules applied to new technology," said Bill Nolan, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg LLP. "It's the 2011 version of the salesperson taking the Rolodex when he/she leaves the company."

PhoneDog cleared the first hurdle in the lawsuit earlier last month when a court rejected Noah Kravitz's request to dismiss the lawsuit. PhoneDog is seeking $340,000 from Kravitz, or about $2.50 for each Twitter user that started following the account @Phonedog_Noah while he was tweeting and writing for the online publication. When ravitz left the company in October 2010 he changed the account's handle to @noahkravitz and retained the more than 17,000 followers he had amassed while working for PhoneDog.

In a legal filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this morning, a copy of which was obtained from Oracle by RWW, attorneys for Oracle Corp. tell the judge in the ongoing infringement lawsuit against Google that it's willing to reopen negotiations for a settlement. Minutes ago, Google responded to that notice by telling the court it's willing to make executives available for settlement talks.

These events after documents filed yesterday in the case, and first uncovered by journalist Florian Mueller, reveal internal Google strategy briefings where it was suggested that Android should be developed on a course that appears to be open source, but actually is not. Instead, the documents from mid-2009 suggest, preferential treatment should be given specifically to Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless for being the first to develop Android phones to Google specifications.

Human-powered search site Mahalo, created by notable entrepreneur, investor and blogger Jason Calacanis, may soon be involved in a class-action lawsuit, the result of a change to its Terms and Conditions that may have affected the pay of its contractors and employees.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

YouTube and the French music-rights collection agency SACEM just announced a deal that ensures that artists are compensated when their music is played on the French version of Google's popular video sharing site. According to SACEM, "the license covers the international repertoire managed by SACEM including in particular the Anglo-American repertoire of multinational publishers, as well as other works managed by SACEM present on the platform, from the launch of the service in France to 2012." In total, YouTube now has similar deals in eight countries.

Microsoft filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, against Salesforce.com for infringement of nine Microsoft patents, according to Horacio Gutierrez, vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing.

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

Online retailer Amazon has ended all Colorado-based affiliate accounts after a new law passed by the state's legislature would have forced them to collect and pay state sales taxes. The law, HB 10-1193, states that any affiliate marketer making more than $10,000 for a retailer is declared a legal agent, and a state presence, of that company. Rather than be forced to pay the state taxes, Amazon has instead side-stepped the law by closing its doors to all affiliates based in Colorado.

Fresh from the official Google blog, we have news that Google is taking a group of online scammers to court.

We've all seen the ads: "Use Google to Make 1000s of Dollars!" "Easy Cash with Google: You Could be Making up to $978 a Day Working from Home!" Finally, the search giant has announced it's going to do something to protect its trademark and help spare a few suckers from getting scalped. Google is suing Pacific WebWorks and a rash of unnamed defendants.

Consumer watchdog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has initiated a lawsuit against multiple U.S. government agencies for failing to disclose their policies regarding the use of social media for surveillance. According to the filing, the government has been making use of social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter to aid in various investigations where the alleged crimes range from the relatively minor infringement of underage drinking, to more serious endeavors, such as the coordination of protesters during the G-20 summit. However, when requests were made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for details about governmental policies, several agencies failed to respond with information regarding what data is collected, under what circumstances and who has access to it.

A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday is charging an iPhone development firm with collecting users' cell phone numbers without their permission. The developer, a game-making firm by the name of Storm8, is the entity behind popular games like iMobsters, World War, Racing Live, Vampires Live, Kingdoms Live, Zombies Live and Rockstars Live, among others. The company has five titles ranked in the top 50 free apps list in iTunes and seven titles in the top 100.

According to the pending class-action suit, Storm8 used a well-known backdoor method to "access, collect, and transmit" the wireless phone numbers belonging to their software's users.

Now the company has publicly responded to the suit by posting on their forums a sort of mea culpa as well as their plans to ask for a dismissal of the lawsuit due to its "complete lack of merit."

Late last week, a federal judge in California gave preliminary approval to a settlement of the class action lawsuit regarding Facebook's Beacon program. The controversial program, launched back in November of 2007, allowed Facebook users to share online purchases made on third-party affiliate websites with their social networking friends. The problem with the program was that it was opt-out instead of opt-in, angering many Facebook users who unknowingly shared information they wished they wouldn't have.