In a long-awaited decision that could shape the debate over Internet taxes, a New York appeals court reinstated Amazon.com and Overstock's lawsuit claiming a state law forcing them to collect sales taxes was unconstitutional. A New York appeals court ruled 5-0 that "the dismissal of the entire complaint was premature" and that the lawsuit should continue.
Nokia Oyj shouldn’t be found liable of infringing Apple Inc.’s patents, the staff of the U.S. International Trade Commission said as a trial started. “The evidence will not establish a violation” of Apple patent rights, the staff, which acts on behalf of the public as a third party in the case, said in a pre-hearing memo.
A 23-year-old California man is in jail accused of breaking into more than 170 e-mail accounts of women and stealing explicit photos of them, as well as sending the photos to their e-mail contacts and posting them on their Facebook pages.
Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours.
British data protection officials said that Google had committed a “significant breach” of privacy laws when its Street View mapping service gathered e-mail messages, computer passwords and other personal information without the owners’ knowledge. Yet Google managed to avoid a fine, with the Information Commissioner’s Office accepting a promise from the company that it would take steps to avoid repeating what it has described as an inadvertent error.
A key Republican lawmaker indicated that Internet privacy could be a legislative priority in the next Congress, as a growing number of data breaches draw increased attention from federal regulators. Rep. Joe L. Barton (Tex.), ranking GOP member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, signaled the legislative push in a statement about his correspondence with Facebook executives on privacy issues.
A mother of four reacted sardonically to a federal jury's decision today on how much she owes the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement damages. The Minneapolis jury determined Jammie Thomas-Rasset was responsible for $1.5 million in damages for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network.
In a lively and sometimes testy Supreme Court argument over a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors, the justices struggled to define how the First Amendment should apply to a new medium. The law would impose $1,000 fines on stores that sell violent video games to people under 18.
A Turkish court ordered that access to Google's YouTube website be blocked again, days after the site was reopened following a 30-month ban. The court in Ankara ordered the closure because the site posted videos showing former opposition leader Deniz Baykal, the state-owned Anatolia news agency reported.
Google said that a settlement for a class action suit by Gmail users over privacy violations related to Google Buzz has been granted preliminary approval by a federal district court judge. The settlement, proposed in September, calls for Google to pay $8.5 million toward a fund for organizations focusing on Internet privacy policy or education.
Arguing that Google's AdWords policies confuse consumers and allow companies to free-ride on the brand names of competitors, Rosetta Stone is asking an appellate court to reinstate the company's trademark infringement lawsuit against Google. "Intellectual property law encourages entrepreneurs to develop brands and protect them as trademarks by prohibiting others from free-riding on the entrepreneurs' efforts," Rosetta Stone says in papers filed with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a move sure to outrage both file-traders on BitTorrent networks and legal watchdogs, a well-known pornographer has filed a federal copyright suit against 7,098 individuals. Axel Braun Productions filed the complaint in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, alleging that the defendants illegally shared the adult film "Batman XXX: A Porn Parody."
Turkey has lifted its ban on YouTube, two years after it blocked access to the website because of videos deemed insulting to the country's founder. Transport Minister Binali Yildirim, who is in charge of internet issues, said the government had been in contact with Google, which owns YouTube.
Google filed suit against the federal government claiming that the U.S. Department of the Interior did not properly evaluate Google Apps when choosing a new Web-based document system. Google alleges that because the Interior Department specified that the system needed to be part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, Google Apps never had a chance despite repeated attempts by Google to explain the product.
Not desiring their brand to go the way of Xerox, Aspirin and Kleenex (which lost their trademark status in the U.S.), the folks at Twitter wrote a post linking to not only their new logos, but also highlighting the rules when it comes to using "tweet" or "twitter" in a product or service.
A trademark lawsuit filed against Apple by a Web advertising firm over the term "iAds" was quietly settled in July. No one has disclosed exactly how the case was resolved but Apple now owns the "iAds" trademark, and one of the parties involved in the case briefly posted a note to the Web that said Apple paid a "seven-figure settlement."
British officials said that they would re-open an investigation into Wi-Fi data collected by Google's Street View cars after the search engine giant admitted that it captured entire e-mails, URLs, and passwords. "We will be making enquires to see whether this information relates to the data inadvertently captured in the U.K., before deciding on the necessary course of action, including a consideration of the need to use our enforcement powers," the Information Commissioner's Office said in a statement.
Facebook Inc. said that a data broker has been paying application developers for identifying user information, and that it had placed some developers on a six-month suspension from its site because of the practice. The announcement, which Facebook made on its developers' blog, follows an investigation by Facebook into a privacy breach that The Wall Street Journal reported in October.
Apple has filed infringement suits against Motorola, saying that Multi-Touch smartphone uses Apple-owned intellectual property. The suits mostly pertain to Motorola's next generation smartphones, specifically the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Cliq XT, BakFlip Devour A555, Devour i1, and Charm.
If states can prohibit minors from buying Penthouse, Hustler and Playboy, why not "Grand Theft Auto" or "Mortal Kombat"? That is the novel question that will confront the justices when they evaluate a California law designed to prevent juveniles from buying or renting violent video games.
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.