A US hardware manufacturer is taking Apple and broadcasting corporation CBS to court over the Mighty Mouse name.

Man & Machine has, since 2004, sold its Mighty Mouse - a waterproof and chemical resistant optical mouse for medical, industrial and marine applications. The firm has filed suit in Maryland, US alleging that Apple’s Mighty Mouse, on sale in wired and wireless forms since 2005, infringes a trademark owned by M&M for use of the name Mighty Mouse.

Apple licensed the right to use the name Mighty Mouse from US broadcaster CBS, which owns the name through its rights to the 1940s cartoon show - Mighty Mouse.

So Apple is in the clear, right? Not so according to M&M, which argues that CBS has no right to license the cartoon show’s name to a computer mouse.

An Englishman has been ordered to stop bragging about his criminal behavior on the internet after an extensive video library of his misdemeanors was spotted on YouTube by local authorities.

Andrew Kellett, 23, was served yesterday with an interim anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) at Leeds Magistrates’ Court that bans him from posting any image or description of unlawful activity on the internet, the Times reports.

Kellett’s 80-video collection posted under the handle mrchimp2007 mostly involve reckless and high-speed driving, although it also features some drug use, theft, trespassing, and other criminal acts for good measure.

“Kellett must be in the running to be Leeds’s dumbest criminal,” Leeds City councillor Les Carter told the The Times. “He has handed us the evidence against him on a plate.”

Under the order, Kellett has been officially banned from being a criminal camerawhore as well as taking part in dangerous driving, failing to observe traffic regulations, or act in a manner which causes alarm, harassment or distress to any person in England and Wales.

Microsoft announced that it would update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, but not to implement its own OOXML format. Moreover, it would also join both the OASIS working group as well as the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group that has control of the ISO/IEC version of ODF. Implementation of DIS 29500, the ISO/IEC JTC 1 version of OOXML that has still not been publicly released will await the release of Office 14, the ship date of which remains unannounced.

The same announcement reveals that Office 2007 will also support PDF 1.1, PDF/A and Microsoft’s competing fixed-text format, called XML Paper Specification. XML Paper Specification is currently being prepared by Ecma for submission to ISO/IEC under the same “Fast-Track” process by which OOXML had been submitted for consideration and approval.

When will the ODF feature be available? We don’t know. I’ve heard through the grapevine that we might be looking at 6 - 9 months. A formal planned ship date would obviously be useful to receive.

The top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Wednesday to detail the search engine’s privacy practices since it acquired rival DoubleClick.

“It is critical that Google’s and DoubleClick’s policies and procedures for handling this information be transparent, and that every effort is made to protect consumers’ data,” Texas Rep. Joe Barton wrote in a letter to the company dated May 21.

In the letter, Barton asked if and how data collected by Google and DoubleClick about computer users would be merged and how the data would be used, and if Google planned to continue allowing users to opt out of ad-serving cookies.

Privacy advocates have expressed concern that a wave of consolidation in online advertising would lead to a concentration of personal information in the hands of a few powerful companies.

Time Warner Inc’s AOL Internet division will launch versions of its video service in Canada, India and Taiwan on Thursday as part of an aggressive global expansion.

By autumn, it will also introduce versions of its video portal, AOL Video ( video.aol.com ), in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president Fred McIntyre said in an interview.

The expansion is part of Time Warner’s plans to refashion AOL as a free, advertising-dependent Web site, as well as to transform itself into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.

“If you look at usage patterns on online video, it is the first global broadband user behavior,” McIntyre said. “It happened everywhere in the world at the same time.”

International availability of online videos from the United States has been held up by copyright licenses, which are negotiated on a regional basis, Internet executives said this week at the Reuters Global Media and Telecoms Summit.

But AOL said it has sealed deals with local programming partners for its regional sites. The availability of shows from U.S. programming partners, such as Hulu, a joint venture of News Corp and General Electric’s NBC Universal, or CBS Corp, is unclear and varies depending on partners

The foundation of the services is built around AOL’s video search technology, Truveo, which has indexed, or searched and sorted related information on than 170 million videos in 16 countries including: Russia, Hong Kong, Germany and France.