Legal Archive

Remember that other tablet, which came out right around the same time the iPad was released? Yeah, the joojoo, by Fusion Garage. During its development, it was known as the CrunchPad, and emerged out of some form of collaboration between Michael Arrington's TechCrunch and Chandrasekhar Rathakrisnan's Fusion Garage. Things went sour between the two, and eventually, Fusion Garage released the joojoo on its own. Consequently, Arrington sued, and we've got the first major court decision.

Most of us here are not particularly big fans of the concept of patents. Most of us are aware of the significance of patents, we just believe the system has gone out of control and needs a serious kick in the butt. Well, it turns out not even the richest people on this earth are immune to the call of the patent troll. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a massive patent lawsuit, using broad and vague patents to sue just about any big name in the business - from Apple to Google.

We're far from done with the Oracle v. Google lawsuit. The search giant has responded to the lawsuit, and Miguel De Icaza has provided a very interesting insight into the case. His report has been confirmed by James Gosling, known as the father of Java who left Sun right after the merger. Icaza speculates that the potential to monetise on Java by suing Google was pitched by Jonathan Schwartz during Sun's sales talks with Oracle. Oh boy.

The entire complaint Oracle lobbed at Google has been available online for a while now, and after reading it through with my total lack of any knowledge of the inner workings of the American legal system, a few things did stand out to me as peculiar. We'll have to wait for a more detailed analysis by someone qualified to do so. Also, a few other notes about this case I've picked up online.

So, there I am enjoying a nice Gilmore Girls episode after a long day's work, and Engadget's iPhone application brings the good news: the US Library of Congress has added a DMCA exemption for jailbreaking or rooting mobile phones! This is a major blow to Apple, who actively tried to keep jailbreaking a criminal offence, and a major win for everyone who believes that the phone you buy is actually yours, and not the manufacturer's.

Canonical have become the first member to sign up to the Open Invention Network's new associate membership program. The Open Invention Network exists to acquire patents and license them royalty free to entities which, in turn, "agree not to assert their own patents against Linux or Linux-related applications." Current well-known companies involved with the OIN include Sony, IBM and Novell.

"SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company's motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury's verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case."

We've talked about ACTA before. ACTA is an anti-capitalistic treaty which implements several measures that will seriously hurt people's freedoms, rights, and privacy, all to, among other things, support a failing business model from an industry which has failed time and time again to adapt to a changing market. In any working free market, business models are allowed to fail, but the US/EU governments clearly don't see it that way. India has now announced that it is going to forge its own anti-ACTA coalition in an effort to undermine the new treaty.

Nero AG, a company with one of the most fitting names ever (can you imagine a company called Hitler or Stalin 2000 years from now?), has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the MPEG-LA. The German technology company claims the licensing body has abused its monopoly power, and that is has not honoured agreements made with the US Department of Justice. There's some juicy stuff in here.

Let the spreading of FUD begin! Known patent troll Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG-LA, is clearly feeling the heat - a heat that might set fire to his company's license to print money. After a decade of empty threats towards Theora, the company is apparently putting its it's-impossible-to-create-a-video-codec-that-doesn't-infringe-on-our-stuff attitude into practice once again, by assembling a patent pool to go after VP8. Google, in the meantime, is not impressed.

"Apple has been slapped with another patent infringement lawsuit - but the suit says more about the festering sore that is the US patent system than it does about the individual patents involved. The lawsuit was filed by Austin, Texas inventor Eric Gould Bear, President and CEO of interface design firm MonkeyMedia. The core of his infringement claim is that his patents cover a user-interface concept that he calls 'Seamless Contraction' - essentially a set of techniques to narrow the display of information to that which is most 'salient', to use his term, to the user's needs."

We haven't discussed the lost iPhone 4G from Apple for a while now, mostly because there was nothing new to report. Now that the 10-page search warrant affidavit has been made available to the public, we finally have a much more complete picture of what exactly went down.

"The Business Software Alliance, an industry trade group that represents many software vendors, has made stamping out software piracy a major initiative. To that end, it commissions an annual survey of global piracy, performed by IDC. There's not a whole lot of information about the methods employed in producing those numbers, so it's difficult to know how reliable they are in absolute terms. But said figures may be valuable for detecting trends, in which case the news is good for the BSA: although piracy remains substantial, it isn't growing at the rates it once was, and many industrialized countries have seen rates of piracy drop below 25 percent."

An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has "metastasized" from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is "something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like," without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.