Conan going to court over joke stealing allegations

journalists just know how to write articles about legal issues any more

translation:
A judge recently ruled that three out of five of these copyright claims by Kaseberg and his lawyers could go forward.
at the pretrial hearing the judge gave summary judgment on two of the claims, i.e. decided that there was no reason for a jury to weigh in on them; the other three need a jury to decide

"Accusing a comedian of stealing a joke is the worst thing you can accuse them of, in my opinion, short of murder," O'Brien said in a deposition.
not a legally significant statement; depositions are conversational and include lots of irrelevant banter like this

Judge Janis Sammartino said in her statement that, "although the punchlines of the jokes are creative,
copyright only protects "substantial works" so conans lawyer must have argued that he only used the punchlines and individual joke punchlines were too short to copyright;  stealing several jokes in their entirety would obviously merit protection

they are nonetheless constrained by the limited number of variations that would (1) be humorous (2) as applied to the specific facts articulated in each joke’s previous sentence and (3) provide mass appeal.
judge is probably talking about the two that she didnt let through; copyright only protects you if you actually steal from somebody; if you come up with the exact same thing by coincidence, you are not liable for infringement; but its hard to prove that it was coincidence and thats why you let a jury decide that; so judge says that coincidence is highly probable when it comes to jokes because comedians are likely to look at the same news story and come up with the same joke

This merits only thin protection. The standard for infringement must therefore also be some form of 'virtual identity.'"
so making a joke that is very very similar to another comedians joke is not enough to prove that you stole from him; its got to be pretty much word for word; so the two jokes that she dismissed probably were not word for word

If there isn't an out-of-court settlement, a final pretrial conference is scheduled to take place in August,
final pretrial is where you set up the dates, schedule witnesses, etc., after that the guy suing can still drop the suit but it will cost mucho $$$ by then