Was Merkey working for Canopy, and what were his duties there?

Well the reported news was the TRG sold it's IP to Canopy in 2002, so I guess the patents were part of that sale. In which case no Merkey didn't work for Canopy.

As for Jeff's handing in his homework, if it's anything like the assignments I do for the OU he'll be being marked down. Firstly it's still got stuff from the first two attempts which are still plainly wrong e.g. 27 when talking about ip-wars.net "The address and location of defendants is believed to be within the State of California, but is unknown at the present time."

Given his dismissals of named defendants the filing is full of irrelevant references to them.

And as you point out it got loads of other totally irrelevant detail. Just that one paragraph alone contains loads of it.
"following a hearing with Judge Alba." - Relevance, who cares that it was following the hearing, does this add more credibility to the rest of the statement.