UPDATE: Rush over to your nearest Phoenix box now for a card worth 30 minutes of free time on a porn site. That's what was worth pawing through all those papers for.

On-the-street reporter Matthew files this puzzler:

Over by North Station I witnessed someone pull the entire stack of papers out of the box. He went through each one to pull out a small white-ish piece of paper.

It didn't look like it was the first distributon box he hit either ...

In addition to the patent used by Phoenix subsidiary Tele-Publishing, Inc. to sue Facebook this week, the company has a patent (issued in 2000) for a method and apparatus for matching registered profiles.

And in 2005, Tele-Publishing sued several alternative weeklies across the country for allegedly violating both of these patents. The issue never got to a jury because the newspapers, in Washington, Chicago and Sacramento, settled the matter by signing a licensing deal with Tele-Publishing (here's the consent decree).

Here's the abstract:

Tele-Publishing, Inc., a subsidiary of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, Inc., yesterday filed a federal lawsuit against Facebook, alleging the social network's personal pages violate a patent Tele-Publishing was granted in 2001.

The complaint, filed in US District Court in Boston, seeks unspecified treble damages and an end to Facebook's alleged infringement of Tele-Publishing's patent, which sets out a method by which a remote user can upload images and information to a server to build a personal Web page.

From the Tele-Publishing patient:

Tele-Publishing bills itself as "the leading provider of revenue generating Personals content to the newspaper industry."

If Tele-Publishing wins, the decision could have a profound effect on the Web, since many sites now use similar techniques for letting users set up personal pages, from large social networks to, well, Universal Hub.

David Bernstein at the Phoenix declares an at-large city council forum on Wednesday "poorly promoted" and lightly attended. Open Media Boston, which helped organize the debate, replies, "oh, yeah?" or words to that effect.

Five years ago, David Bernstein at the Phoenix wrote a long article about the Boston Police Department's really low success rate in getting murderers put away, The Worst Homicide Squad In The Country."

Adam Reilly reports, adds people at the top are taking bigger pay cuts than those at the bottom.

In the Jan. 30 edition of the Phoenix:

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/75898-Rescuing-the-Globe/

It's Ask The Phoenix Political Reporter Anything Day again. Now, last time, we were a bit sophomoric, so let's ask him about Obama or the state budget crisis or Sam Yoon or something, rather, than, oh, a list of stupid questions. And Zak? That Rule 34 thing? Oh, never mind, you're going to ask about that no matter what I say.

The Boston Phoenix has bought El Planeta, one of the four Spanish-language newspapers now serving the Boston area, along with its Web site, TuBoston.com. Terms of the deal were not announced, nor were any plans to come out with a new paper called El Fenix.

Dear David Bernstein,

Could God make a boulder so heavy even He couldn't lift it?

Hey! You said we could ask you anything today, and you promised you'd answer all our questions!