Legal Archive

Right, well, this is new. We know of countless copyright lawsuits being thrown about regarding BitTorrent - but what about a patent lawsuit? A company which, for now, has all the airs of a classic patent troll, has sued BitTorrent, Inc. and uTorrent, claiming the BitTorrent protocol violates some vague software patent. No connection to the mafia RIAA/MPAA/etc. has been found yet, but I won't be surprised.

"Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuit that Lodsys slapped on seven iOS developers last Tuesday. The company maintained that its license for Lodsys patents allows developers to use in-app purchase APIs, and that it has a right to intervene since its licensed technology is at issue."

In order to not overwhelm OSNews with even more legal news, I didn't report on the recent developments in Apple v. Samsung until we had some more stuff to consolidate. Well, since the goings been getting good lately there, let's talk about it. Samsung was ordered to hand over a slew of unreleased products and materials to Apple, and now, Samsung, for its part, has demanded that Apple hands over the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 to Samsung. If they exist. This is gettin' good.

"The French government's 'three strikes' approach to online copyright infringement relies on a private company that scans file-sharing networks and gathers the IP addresses of alleged Gallic content pirates. But that company, TMG, suffered an embarrassing security breach last week, and the French government has 'temporarily suspended' its acquisition of new TMG data while an investigation is underway." Yeah, the company that collects IP addresses of alleged file shares got Sony'd.

"A new bill backed by movie studios and other large copyright holders takes a novel approach to curbing access to piratical Web sites: an Internet death penalty. That's a good way to describe the approach adopted by the legislation introduced today, which specifies a step-by-step method for making Web sites suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks vanish from the Internet. It's called the Protect IP Act. The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms - which would in turn be required to 'expeditiously' make the target Web site invisible." ...because the interests of big content are obviously far more important than socialist communist terrorist nonsense like freedom of speech, right to a fair trial, innocent until proven otherwise, and so on. This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Honest.

"A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person."