Legal Archive

Yesterday, the web was ablaze about how the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 wouldn't be sold in Australia due the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung. Turns out the story was blown out of proportion. Official statement from Samsung explains it all: "Apple Inc. filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia. No injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia. A Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future. This undertaking does not affect any other Samsung smartphone or tablet available in the Australian market or other countries. Samsung will continue to actively defend and protect our intellectual property to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communication business."

"Apple won an agreement from Samsung that the South Korean company won't sell the newest version of its tablet computer in Australia until a patent lawsuit in the country is resolved. sought an Australian injunction and also wants to stop Samsung from selling the tablet in other countries, Burley said without specifying where. Samsung agreed to stop advertising the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and not to sell the device until it wins court approval or the lawsuit is resolved, according to an accord reached by lawyers during a break in the hearing. Should Apple lose its patent infringement lawsuit, it agreed to pay Samsung damages, which weren't specified." Free market and competition at work, my friends!

Two different graphs. Both happen to be published at Ars Technica, with one of them coming from a different source. Seemingly completely unrelated, but when you ponder the waterfall of recent lawsuit-related news, these two graphs suddenly tell all there is to tell. These two innocent little graphs illustrate why Apple is attacking Android so ferociously.

Forbes' Timothy B. Lee has dug up a remarkable piece of history regarding IBM and Sun Microsystems that's an almost one-to-one copy of the situation between Microsoft and Android. Thirty years ago, IBM knocked on Sun's door. We've got some patents, IBM said. Please pay up.

"Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and online political activist, has been indicted in Boston on charges that he stole more than four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers." The weird part? JSTOR dropped all claims against him, because "they've suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute". Weird.

"App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents - just as a Mumbai-based company has made a wide-ranging claim against Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and a number of other companies over Twitter-style feeds, for which it claims it has applied for a patent."

Patent term calculation is complicated in the US because there are essentially two different systems and quite a few corner cases. Even with a list of patents, it can be tricky to determine when the patents are all expired. Since I am a computer programmer (and not a lawyer), I created a program to try and automate this. This paper discusses how patent term calculation works, and some results from a combination of hand and automatic term calculation for MP3, MPEG-2 and H.264.

I've been sitting on this item all day. Technically, it's about patents and the like, and even I understand I've been beating this dead horse so often it almost looks like it's alive. However, this is an interesting opinion piece by Craig Hockenberry, long-time employee at The Iconfactory, one of my favourite software development houses - these guys breath software and beautiful design, and employ one of my favourite artists, David Lanham. The gist of his story? Software patents are killing the independent developer scene.

Blah blah Apple whines about a bunch of software patents again. Go cry in a corner, Jobs. Either find a strategy that counters the rise of Android, or just suck it up and be a man about it. Oh, HTC is the target this time around. Again. Whatever.

I think we just witnessed the seed for a whole boatload of new patent lawsuits in the mobile space. The bid for the massive Nortel patent portfolio, has been won not by Google, but by a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Research In Motion. Sigh.

"The House on Wednesday took up the most far-reaching overhaul of the patent system in 60 years, a bill that leaders in both parties said would make it easier for inventors to get their innovations to market and help put people back to work. The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world." In other words, more protection for large companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and an increasing number of nonsense patents due to faster application procedures.

This make me a sad little facepalming unicorn. Apple has just slapped the open source home server project Amahi with a cease and desist letter about the project's use of the term 'app store' - stop using the term, or face Cupertino's army of lawyers. Note: Please help me find out what 'Mac App' is, a supposed Apple product from 1985 - the first citation of the term 'app' in the Oxford English Dictionary. Another note: Okay I should've guessed that publications from that time could still correct company's horrid camel case spelling without unleashing the wrath of fanboys - it's MacApp, not Mac App. Graçias, guys!

Just as Apple wraps up one lawsuit with Nokia, they have been hit with another one by a Phoenix based company named iCloud Communications. iCloud Communications, a VoIP vendor, claims that Apple's new iCloud causes confusion with competing products, and has harmed their image because anytime someone hears the name 'iCloud', they will now think of Apple instead of iCloud Communications. Super-Instant Pre-publication 5000W Turbo Update from Thom: ...and we have another one.

Well, the first of the big patent litigations is over. Since this one involves Apple, the big winner is obviously the highly innovative company from Cupertiono, right? The company from which all others copy, right? Well, no, not exactly. The big winner is Nokia.