Legal Archive

"President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation's solicitor general. The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it would bring to the Supreme Court for review. Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry's legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster's demise when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the RIAA's verdict." Cough.

"Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java." Update: ZDNet provides some compelling evidence that it's not so.

Well, it would appear that Sony isn't particularly pleased with the fact that their console has been hacked into oblivion. It has officially filed suit against the fail0verflow hacker group and Geohot, after filing a temporary restraining order yesterday to try and remove the jailbreak information from the web (how cute).

"Early in December Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle notified the German regulator that they planned to form CPTN Holdings with a view to purchasing 882 of Novell's patents. But the filing was withdrawn (Rucknahme) on Dec. 30. No reason was given for the withdrawal by German authorities, but it is likely voluntary as authorities would not yet have had time to investigate the proposal."

"Between slagging each other off with cartoons and taking each other to court over chipset licenses, there's been no love lost between NVIDIA and Intel over the past few years - but it looks like the war is over. The two companies just announced a new six-year cross-licensing deal that will see Intel paying NVIDIA a total of $1.5b over the next five years for access to NVIDIA's technology, while also giving NVIDIA a license to some of Intel's patents. The two companies have also agreed to drop all pending litigation, because you know, they're now friends who just exchanged a billion and half dollars."

When it comes to the Wikileaks saga, we've been trying to only report on it if it crosses into the realm of technology. It was revealed yesterday and today that the US Justice Department has sent subpoenas to Twitter, demanding the personal information of several Wikileaks supporters who use Twitter. One of them is a member of the Icelandic parliament.

Due to my incessant whining about the evilness of big content, it's easy to forget that despite all the lunacy those guys throw our way, there are also cases where they're simply very much right. The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on the story of Qiang Bi, who has just been sentenced to jail for two and half years for piracy.

"Hopewell Culture & Design reckons it owns the act of double-clicking, and is suing Apple, Nokia, Samsung and just about everyone else for breaching its patent. It's not double-clicking per se that US patent 7,171,625 covers, just the act of clicking twice on an already-selected component to action a request for additional information or greater interactivity."

Paul Allen's patent infringement complaint against the world and its dog has been dismissed. The court agreed with Google et al that it "lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal" and also "fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18". The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: "The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18."

An arrest has been made in the case of the DDoS attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and others. The Dutch police has arrested a Dutch guy who has already confessed to taking part in the attacks. Most likely, he is not in any way the brains behind the operation, and I'm going out on a limb here stating that these attacks will continue nonetheless. Also, I'm not the guy. Also also, I'm wondering if there's police anywhere looking for the people who are continuously DDoS'ing WikiLeaks.

"The licensing dispute that has prevented NVIDIA from building controller chips for Intel's latest CPUs may finally be coming to a close. Late last week, a Bloomberg report cited inside sources that claim the two companies are in talks to settle the matter out of court. While both Intel and NVIDIA would benefit from a settlement - for instance, by avoiding legal fees for protracted litigation - Apple also stands to gain."

"Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind game-console-modding criminal trial abruptly dropped their prosecution Thursday, "based on fairness and justice." Following procedural rulings made by the presiding judge in the aftermath of his 30-minute tirade yesterday, it emerged that a key witness, an employee of the Entertainment Software Alliance, had provided a pirated game to the defendant during the course of his investigation. As this detail had been known to the government for almost a week but had been withheld from the defense, prosecutors had no choice but to move for a dismissal."

Opening statements in the first-of-its kind Xbox 360 criminal hacking trial were delayed here Wednesday after a federal judge unleashed a 30-minute tirade at prosecutors in open court, saying he had "serious concerns about the government's case". "I really don't understand what we’re doing here," US District Judge Philip Gutierrez roared from the bench. Gutierrez slammed the prosecution over everything from alleged unlawful behavior by government witnesses, to proposed jury instructions harmful to the defense.

We've had a bit of a copyrightesque weekend here on OSNews, so it seems only fitting to end this Sunday with yet another story on this subject. This one isn't so much anger-inducing as much as it is what?-inducing - you'll either laugh or cry. It basically comes down to this: a smart lawyer is selling self-help packages to aid victims of the mass-P2P lawsuits in the US, and now the media companies behind those lawsuits are suing this lawyer... For causing them damage.