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Petitioner Supap Kirtsaeng in 2014. (credit: Doug Kari)

Supap Kirtsaeng built himself a business on eBay buying textbooks in Asia and reselling them to students in the US. That practice made him the target of a copyright lawsuit by John Wiley & Sons, a large textbook company that didn't like Kirtsaeng undercutting their US prices. Lawyers for Wiley said that they should control the right to import their copyrighted works.

Kirtsaeng won a resounding victory in 2013, when the Supreme Court said he was protected by the first-sale doctrine. He'd bought the books legally and could resell them, even if that involved moving the books across the border.

After his win, Kirtsaeng sought to get his attorneys' fees paid. In the US legal system, parties must generally bear their own expenses. However, copyright law allows for judges to "award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party," at their discretion. Because of that provision, fee-shifting is more common in copyright cases.

On Saturday, regulators in California decided to hold off on a plan to capture and burn the natural gas that is leaking from a broken storage well just north of Los Angeles, citing the risk of a “catastrophic explosion,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The well at the Aliso Canyon storage facility has been leaking since October 23, belching massive amounts of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, into the air. Methane is not only bad for climate change, it’s also extremely flammable.

At first, California regulators wanted to take advantage of that property of methane by capturing and burning off the gas coming from the well. That would have reduced the methane’s impact on the environment somewhat while Southern California Gas, the company that owns the Aliso Canyon facility, finished drilling the relief well to plug the underground reservoir feeding the leak. As National Geographic noted in an article last week, "Flaring gas has a much lower impact on the climate than a vent directly into the atmosphere—the flame converts gas into an amount of carbon dioxide that will have 30 times less warming potential in the near term.”

Hot Octopuss, a sex toy company, provides Internet for anyone who wants to relieve a little stress. (credit: Hot Octopuss)

This month will see the first rollout of LinkNYC's free Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City, which are set to replace nearly 7,500 neglected public telephones. Along with this experimental urban upgrade, New Yorkers can also expect to see another pay phone replacement idea: a "GuyFi" booth where men can "relieve stress" with a laptop and chair behind a privacy curtain.

Last week, a sex toy company called Hot Octopuss converted an unused phone booth at 28th Street and 5th Avenue into its GuyFi chamber of self-love by adding a black privacy curtain, a chair, and a laptop with high-speed Internet. Clearly playing on the buzz about LinkNYC's upgrades to New York's pay phone infrastructure, Hot Octopuss sent out a press release explaining that this was all about health:

According to Time Out, a remarkable 39% of New Yorkers ‘self-soothe’ in the workplace to alleviate stress. Hot Octopuss has created the GuyFi booth to take this habit out of the office and into a more suitable environment designed to give the busy Manhattan man the privacy, and the high-speed Internet connection, he deserves.

The company reported that at least 100 men used the booth on its opening day last week. Of course, public masturbation is illegal—and a rep from Hot Octopuss told Mashable, "We may be insinuating that these booths could be used in whichever way anyone would like to 'self soothe,' [but] the brand is not actively encouraging people to masturbate in public as that is an illegal offense." No word on how fast the Internet connection was, or whether there would be any efforts to help women "self soothe" at a rate equal to men in the workplace.

An officer with the Fresno Police Department wears a Taser Axon Flex body-worn camera. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Two major providers of police body-worn cameras have become embroiled in a patent battle.

Kansas-based Digital Ally sued Arizona-based Taser International late last week. The company accused Taser's Axon Flex body cameras of infringing its US Patent No. 8,781,292. The patent describes linking together a body-worn camera, a vehicle-based camera, and a "managing apparatus" that communicate with each other.

The lawsuit was filed just after the Digital Ally patent overcame Taser's legal challenge at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Slide the pen in like this on older units, and it will get jammed. Removing it can break some S-Pen functionality.

Back in August during the launch of the Galaxy Note 5, an issue was discovered that could potentially break the device. If you stuck the S-Pen in backwards—pointy part first instead of flat part first—it would get stuck. From there, you'd have to forcefully remove the S-Pen, which could potentially break the top off the pen or damage the pen eject functionality.

Samsung's first response to the problem was to ship the Note 5 with a warning sticker on the screen, but now Phandroid has discovered that new Note 5s will offer a real, physical solution.

Pen detection on the Galaxy Note 5 was handled by an internal switch that the pen would hold down on when it was inserted. When put in backward, a void in the top of the pen would catch the spring-loaded switch, trapping the pen. Samsung has now put a flexible, plastic cover over the switch, which acts like a ramp. When the thinner part of the S-Pen passes over the switch in this setup, the ramped plastic allows the pen to press the switch down rather than catch it. (The cover also seems to be attached with adhesive tape.)

iPads. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

A woman whose husband died has spent months trying to gain access to his Apple account, according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report today. Apple initially told the woman that she would have to provide a will and death certificate, but once she provided those documents the company reportedly asked for something else—a court order.

There are good privacy and security reasons for Apple to impose strict controls on account access, but in this case the company seems to have acknowledged it went too far by demanding a court order. After CBC got involved, Apple relented and will apparently allow the widow, 72-year-old Peggy Bush of Victoria, BC, to get access to her late husband's Apple ID.

"After [CBC News] contacted Apple, it did reach out to the Bush family and apologize for what it called a 'misunderstanding,' offering to help the family solve the problem—without a court order," the report said. "At the time of publication, it was working with Donna Bush to do that."

NASA's HL-20 in the fog at Langley Research Center in Virginia. (credit: NASA)

Last week when NASA awarded Sierra Nevada a contract to develop its Dream Chaser vehicle for cargo delivery to the International Space Station, it validated a design that dates back half a century. This particular winged vehicle concept marked the Soviet Union’s first attempt to develop a space plane and now, in an ironic twist of history, the Soviet design may help the United States to commercialize space.

The Dream Chaser traces its heritage to the BOR series "Беспилотный орбитальный ракетоплан," or uncrewed orbital rocket plane of lifting bodies, which themselves were derived from a 1965 space plane concept, the Soviet MiG-105. The BOR-1 was first tested in 1969, launching to an altitude of 100 km as the Soviets sought to study various heat shields for a winged vehicle.

A 1:2 scale mockup of the BOR-4 (Wikimedia).

The Soviets continued a series of test flights leading up to the BOR-4 vehicle, and it began flying in 1980. Although they had discarded the BOR concept for their space plane (choosing instead the shuttle-derived Buran orbiter), Soviet engineers continued to use the vehicle as a means to test the Buran’s thermal protection system.