Lawsuits

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a state law that lets somebody take out a "harassment order" against a person who utters "fighting words" or "true threats."

A law passed in 2010 extended some of the protections accorded victims of domestic abuse to people feeling abused by people not in their immediate family, if they could show three examples of harassment.

One of its first applications came not long after in Northampton, where a police officer got one of the new orders against a long-standing acquaintance who seemed to have a grudge against him; the man appealed, saying he had a First Amendment right to flip the officer off and to blare his horn outside the cop's house.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today a gun owner was not liable for the death of a man who stole one of his guns then died when the gun went off as he was putting it back at his sister's insistence.

Boston Capital, which has been providing financial services since the 1970s, is suing a Quincy resident who's set up a company to provide financial services called Boston Capital Partners.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Boston Capital accuses Ravi Chaudhary of glomming onto its name in a deliberate attempt to confuse people, and that he failed to change his ways after it asked him to back in March. The suit asks a judge to order him to stop using the name, destroy any promotional material emblazoned with the name, hand his Web site over to the Boston firm and, of course, pay lots of money.

Envisn, a company that makes software for managing Cognos "business intelligence" systems, yesterday sued its former support manager, charging she spent a couple of hours downloading all of the company's software and customer records and then quit.

In its suit, filed in US District Court in Boston, the Harvard-based company seeks an injunction against Kathleen Davis doing anything with the data she has and $30 million in damages. Envisn charges that with her knowledge of the software, she could easily decompile the code, help a competitor come out with a cheaper version and destroy the company.

The suit alleges that on Nov. 28, starting around 6:04 a.m., Davis downloaded copies of Envisn's products - including a beta that had been given to just two customers - as well as customer records from salesforce.com. At 8:15 a.m., the suit alleges, she e-mailed company President Charles Ryan that she was resigning, effective immediately.