Legal Archive

The US is really ramping up its war on intellectual property infringement, a war which I'm sure will be just as successful, cheap and supported by the people as the wars on drugs and terrorism. The US has started seizing the domain names of various websites through ICANN - not because owners of these sites were convicted of anything, but merely because complaints have been filed against them. Anyone want to take a guess how long it will be before the US government blocks WikiLeaks? Update: The blocks function outside of the US too. In other words, the US is forcing its views upon the rest of the world once again.

"Three of the admins behind The Pirate Bay are all still guilty, a Swedish appeals court decided on Friday, but their jail time has been reduced. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom's prison sentences have all been reduced from the original one year to between 4 and 10 months each, though the trade-off is an increase in damages that they must pay to the music and movie industries."

Oh it's on. It's on. They just messed with the wrong... Euh, companies. It seems like both Samsung and HTC are gearing up for war, and in doing so, have pretty much made a deal with what could turn out to be the devil. They've both partnered with Intellectual Ventures, a company which hoards patents only to license them to others - however, the company has no history of litigation.

"The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee."

A little over two months ago, OSNews had a bit of a run-in with Commodore USA's CEO, about how I felt about the company and its rather dubious business practices. This led to a legal threat we laughed away here at OSNews, but laughable or not, a legal threat is a legal threat, and it never sat well with me that it was never retracted or apologised for. Well, that changed today.

It seems like the first battle in the patent dispute between Nokia and Apple has been in Nokia's favour. The staff of the US International Trade Commission has sided with Nokia, stating that either the claims in Apple patents were invalid, or they were not infringed upon. All this was detailed in a memo, but for some reason, nobody is actually linking to said memo, making this story a little sparse on details (cookie if you can find the memo).

Yesterday, we discussed the claims made by Oracle about Google allegedly copying their code, and quickly enough, the web - I included - concluded that it looked like the code in question originally came from Apache's Harmony Project - although no one could find it in the current code repository. Earlier this morning, I contacted the Apache Software Foundation, and they cleared everything up: the contested class library does not, and did not, come from the Apache Harmony project.

Now, this is an interesting development in the ongoing war against Android. Oracle didn't just sue Google for allegedly infringing its Java patents; it also claimed copyright infringement. Oracle has amended its complaint, and, fair is fair, they've got the code to prove it: indeed, Android contains code that appears to be copied verbatim from Java - mind you, appears. However, the code in question comes straight from Apache's Harmony project, which raises the question - would a respected and long-established cornerstone of the open source world really accept tainted code in the first place?

Britain's Attorney General has said that website owners should be made legally responsible for comments made by visitors. According to a report on Out-law.com, Dominic Grieve told members of the Criminal Bar Association that the spiralling number of internet news web sites meant it was becoming more and more difficult for courts to ensure that trials were fair, and that juries were not exposed to material that could prejudice a hearing.

And we have another interesting development in the ongoing and ever-expanding idiocy that is the War of the High-Fiving Lawyers Mobile Patent World War. Motorola, now a central player in this worldwide conflict that is hurting consumers' wallets and clogging legal systems all over the world, has come to HTC's rescue by seeking to invalidate the patents Apple sued HTC with earlier this year.

Speaking of patent lawsuits - somebody pointed out to me that both Oracle and Google are members of the Open Invention Network. This struck me as odd - doesn't the OIN license require you to promise not to assert your patents against Linux systems? And, uhm, isn't that kind of what Oracle is doing right now? Well, yes, they might be suing a Linux System - but they're not suing a Linux System as defined by the OIN.

And so, the idiocy in the mobile industry continues. Motorola has just upped the ante in this already ridiculous spider web of lawsuits by suing the pants off Apple. Eighteen patents are involved, most of which seem to be actual hardware patents, but that doesn't make some of them any less obvious (apparently, you can patent the location of your antenna). Anywho, like Nokia, Motorola claims that Apple is unwilling to license Motorola's patents, and as such, suing was the only option.

So, Apple has to pay boatloads of money to some patent troll over cover flow and Time Machine-related patents.

Today EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Apache Software Foundation, filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which Microsoft is trying to make it easier to invalidate an issued U.S. patent. If successful, this challenge should help in the fight against bad patents by lowering the standard required to prove that the patent is invalid to the same one required to prove infringement. It should especially help the free and open source community.