Notable & Newsworthy: In Brief

A few stories have broken in the past few days that our vast team of writers, reporters and editors (which is to say the two of us) just haven't been able to get to for in-depth analysis. But they're worth a note, so we present them here in brief.

-- The Masters is underway this very weekend, so we just had to lead with a golf auction. British auctioneer Bonhams & Butterfields will hold its second stateside golf auction April 19th and 20th, with 600 lots up for bid at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Mass. Golfweek says the event will feature a J. Jackson long-nose putter (circa 1840) which is expected to fetch over $5,000.

-- As promised, Yale Galanter, attorney for Orenthal James Simpson, filed papers on Tuesday seeking to block the pending auction of the rights to "If I Did It," the hypothetical tell-all in which "Juice" describes how he might have committed double-homicide. As we reported here last week, April 17th is the date the rights to the book are to be auctioned. The Eat the Press section on the Huffington Post blog cites an ABC News report on the latest twist ion this tragic tale that just won't end. Apparently Simpson would like to block the auction so that, if published, the book's profits won't end up in the hands of the family of Ron Goldman.

-- The website AfterDawn.com reported a story of an Indiana who man has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for selling more than $700,000 worth of counterfeit computer software on eBay. 36-year-old Courtney Smith admitted to purchasing counterfeit copies of Rockwell Automation software on eBay and the mass duplicating the copyrighted programs for later sale on the site.

-- eBay has extended its maintenance period in order to make necessary adjustments to the site. The new maintenance period will be 4 hours (instead of 2 hours), and will start at 22:00 PT on Thursdays and end at 02:00 PT on Fridays. They say that they realize their scheduled maintenance periods can impact your ability to use the site, so be aware that while you will likely see little disruption when using the site during their maintenance period, certain eBay features may be slow or unavailable during those times.

Also eBay:

-- The company announced a pending categories update. A complete overview of the new categories can be found on eBay Seller Central.