Legal Archive

"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.

"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."

"A California man charged with violating the DMCA by installing mod chips in Xbox 360 consoles won't be allowed to claim 'fair use' at his scheduled jury trial next week, a federal judge ruled Tuesday - a decision potentially devastating to the defense, and not particularly favorable to anyone who thinks they have the right to tinker with hardware that they've bought and paid for."

"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."

About time! Google has responded to Oracle's amended complaint in the big Oracle v Google patent and copyright hoedown, and it's a contradictory grab bag of various defences, basically throwing everything and seeing what sticks - a normal and common course of events in cases like this. There are some juicy claims in there.

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).

Apple sued Motorola back. Who wants a Pop-Tart? Seriously, why don't they sell Pop-Tarts in The Netherlands? Why do I have to jump through so many hoops just to get Pop-Tarts? Or root beer for that matter? I mean, come on.

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?

If you can't compete, litigate. This train of thought has been quite prevalent among major technology companies as of late, most notably by Apple and Microsoft, who both cannot compete with Android on merit, so they have to resort to patent lawsuits and FUD. Both Asustek and Acer have revealed that Microsoft plans to impose royalty fees upon the two Taiwanese hardware makers to prevent them from shipping Android and/or Chrome OS devices.

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.

You think only "pirates" and "freeloaders" rail against current copyright laws? Well, think again - even the Library of Congress seemingly has had enough. The topic is recorded sound preservation, and in a 181-page in-depth study, the Library of Congress concludes that apart from technical difficulties, US copyright law makes it virtually impossible for anyone to perform any form of audio preservation. The painted picture is grim - very grim.