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Pierce O’Donnell, once one of Hollywood’s top plaintiff attorneys, has pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards.
O’Donnell entered a guilty plea on two misdemeanors in a deal with prosecutors that will likely sentence him to six months in prison. He’ll also have to pay a $20,000 fine and serve 200 hours of community service. The attorney rose to prominence in Hollywood by taking many accounting cases against studios. He most famously represented Art Buchwald in a stolen script lawsuit against Paramount Pictures over the film Coming to America.
O’Donnell was targeted by prosecutors for reimbursing his firm’s employees for donations they had made to the Edwards campaign.
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- Lady Gaga is being sued by a Chicago woman who claims the singer and her producing partner stole her song, “Juda,” to create the hit “Judas.” The plaintiff says she introduced her song to her former bass player and a sound engineer who was working with Gaga.
- Spotify, the popular music streaming service that just launched in the U.S., is one of the latest targets of a class action over breaches in privacy laws. According to the lawsuit, Spotify was a customer of web analytics firm KISSmetrics, which allegedly had methods of tracking customers even after they tried to delete tracking cookies on their web browsers.
- Hollywood lawyers are closely following a copyright lawsuit brought by adult entertainment publisher Perfect 10 against Megaupload, thanks to some surprising developments, including a response by the foreign-based storage website and the surfacing of a mystery man.
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