The MTTLR Blog

When teen pop star Justin Bieber’s signing became a riot of teens on Friday around 2:30pm, police were called in to control the crowd. Unable to quickly contain the situation, they asked his label’s VP, James A. Roppo, to send out a tweet to cancel the event and disperse the crowd.  When Mr. Roppo failed to do so, they took him into custody, reasoning that “he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”  At his arraignment on Saturday, Mr. Roppo pled not guilty to the charges of felony assault, endangering the welfare of a child, obstruction of governmental administration, reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance.

(Curiously enough, Justin’s Twitter page has a tweet at 4:30pm finally asking his fans to leave the event.)

[Via Gizmodo]

[Video clips]

Twitter has been the subject of controversy as of late, primarily regarding the content of “tweets,” Twitter’s user-sent messages.  Some of this controversy has turned into legal action.  While the highest-profile controversies involve celebrities, such as the one involving the recently-settled lawsuit regarding a Twitter impostor of Major League Baseball manager Tony LaRussa, even non-celebrities have filed Twitter-related lawsuits, such as in the Chicago, Illinois lawsuit involving a corporate landlord taking offense to a tenant’s allegedly libelous “tweets” regarding her “moldy” apartment.

Thus, it may not have been much of a surprise that the wildly popular micro-blogging service itself was hit with a patent lawsuit.

On August 4, 2009, a Texas technology company filed a lawsuit against Twitter for patent infringement.  In its complaint, plaintiff TechRadium alleges that Twitter infringes on TechRadium’s patented IRIS mass notification system technology.  While attorney George Borkowski commented in Wired “Twitter is likely to claim that the [TechRadium] patents should be voided because what has been patented is too generic,”  we will be waiting to see what consequences the lawsuit will have on the digital media world.