cbd3[1] Speaking of tablets, anyone remember the JooJoo nee CrunchPad? It got a software update last week, and when I saw the story on Engadget a few days ago I actually had to cudgel my brain before I remembered what it was.

But that’s actually not the most interesting news to hit about the device lately. Last night, the ruling came out on the lawsuit that Mike Arrington filed against Fusion Garage for allegedly stealing the tablet right out from under them. The ruling itself can be found on Scribd, but an interesting analysis can be found at Hank Williams’s “Why does everything suck?” blog.

In short, Arrington’s request for an injunction was denied because it wasn’t specific enough, and probably unnecessary for TechCrunch to recover money in any event. But even though the business partnership between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage wasn’t documented very well, the judge felt it was likely they had been in a partnership and Fusion Garage had breached its fiduciary duty.

Williams thinks that it is likely that Arrington will eventually win the case, but it will be a pyrrhic victory because the Joo Joo is not going to make Fusion Garage enough money to be worth fighting over.

Although it is less nuanced than Williams’s analysis, Engadget also has coverage, concluding on the note:

P.S.- How or why either company continues to pay for all these legal bills is beyond us, but we’ve actually heard rumors of a Joojoo 2, so things could get even crazier. And potentially even less responsive to touch-based events.

If the force of any dispute is inversely proportional to the amount at stake, expect a lot of sound and fury coming out of the courtroom on this one. But don’t expect to see any of it on TechCrunch, which has not yet covered this story itself. (Not that I’d really expect them to in any event. The first rule of being involved in a lawsuit is you don’t talk about the lawsuit.)

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