Legal Archive

Well paint me red etc. etc. girl scout. "Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood's ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile's case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications."

"Oracle's case against Google has evolved primarily into a copyright infringement suit over the past several months, and with the full trial scheduled to begin this coming Monday, the court is making an effort to get down to the nuts and bolts of copyright law. The judge issued an order last week requiring that both Google and Oracle provide their respective positions on a fundamental issue in the case: 'Each side shall take a firm yes or no position on whether computer programming languages are copyrightable'." Seems like an easy enough answer to me, especially since Oracle's example doesn't hold up at all - Oracle points to Klingon's custom glyphs to illustrate that a language can fall under copyright, but unlike Klingon, a programming language uses standard glyphs we all use every day. Arguing you can copyright that is borderline psychotic, and opens up a whole can of worms.

"The Justice Department could sue Apple as early as Wednesday over alleged electronic book price-fixing, while settling with several publishers as early as this week, two people familiar with the matter said." I feel safe already. Update: ...and we have lift-off.

"The man who co-founded Apple - the world's most valuable company - in the garage of Steve Jobs' parents, fears the torrent of intellectual property lawsuits being filed by companies such as Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC and Nokia could prevent future entrepreneurs from treading a path to technology fortune." Well, mr Wozniak, you are, technically, still an Apple employee. Shouldn't be too hard for you to get an audience with mr Cook.

Rage-inducing and despicable. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education, are suing a small startup company that produces open and free alternative textbooks. This startup, Boundless Learning, builds textbooks using creative commons licensed and otherwise freely available material - and this poses a threat to the three large textbook publishers. So, what do you do when you feel threatened? Well, file a copyright infringement lawsuit, of course.

Google has just responded to the first set of questions from the EU regarding its new consolidated privacy policy. The EU inquiry is being headed by the French - more specifically, by France's National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties. So, the country that monitors all its citizens' internet traffic for possible copyright infringement is spearheading the investigation into Google's new privacy policy? I'm not sure I should be laughing, crying, or shoving shards of smallpox-infested glass underneath my fingernails.

"Linus Torvalds just can't help but be a thorn in Microsoft's side. First, he created an open source project that completely upset Microsoft's business model. And now, he has helped shoot down an important Microsoft patent in Redmond's crusade to wring licensing dollars out of Google Android and other versions of Linux."

"Last week a large, profitable company sued a small start-up business for patent infringement. As a non-legal person, I can only guess that this sort of thing must happen fairly often. I would also guess that the large companies, which have the means to hire crackerjack legal teams and drag cases out, must often win. And while I guess I feel bad for the small businesses, I've never really cared before now. Because this time, the stakes are high. This time, it's my daughter's voice on the line. Literally." Infuriating. Maybe these are the kinds of stories we need to get normal people to care enough to force lawmakers to change. Sadly, the big bags of money from Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle are probably far more important to them than this sad story.

Some people (you know who) predicted the Oracle-Google lawsuit would spell doom for Google and Android. Well, turns out this was all a huge fuss over nothing. Oracle's damages claim started at an idiotic $6 billion - but the final claim is less than $100 million. Oracle's patent trolling is turning into a huge failure of epic proportions.

Notorious competition law offender Microsoft has asked the EU's competition department to look into Motorola's behavior regarding patent licences vital for h.264 video. Microsoft complains that Motorola doesn't play by the usual rules and wants to decide by itself how much they want to charge for patents it owns. According to Microsoft, acceptable behavior for patent owners is to licence patens vital for industry standards at rates of single-digits-cents per device and ask for double-digits-cent amounts only for patents not necessary for implementing such standards. Since according to Microsoft's complaints at least some of the patents abused that way are related to h.264 video encoding/decoding, one has to wonder how much MPEG LA's ensurance of patent safety is now worth.

"Regulators in the US and European Union are investigating Google for bypassing the privacy settings of millions of users of Apple's Safari Web browser, according to people familiar with the investigations. Google stopped the practice last month after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal. The investigations - which span U.S. federal and state agencies, as well as a pan - European effort led by France - could embroil Google in years of legal battles and result in hefty fines for privacy violations."

"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.

"Patent monopolies prevent innovation. It is a system that works against innovations, to protect the current corporations against competition from aggressive, innovative, and competitive upstarts. It allows the big corporations to crush competitive upstarts in the courtroom, rather than having to compete with their products and services." ...which happens to be exactly why the old boys' club of computer technology (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) wants to keep it this way. This is not a system for the people, it's a system for huge corporations.

"A US judge has ordered Motorola Mobility and Google to turn over information to Apple on Google's acquisition in 2005 of Android, its development of the Android OS and the proposed acquisition of Motorola. According to Motorola, the information Apple seeks regarding Google's acquisition of Motorola and Android is not relevant to any damages asserted in the case."