Google faces a total of nine antitrust complaints which EU regulators are now investigating, two sources said, as rivals ramped up the pressure on the world No. 1 search engine. The European Commission has up to now only confirmed four cases against Google.
A porn site with a litigious history has won an important early round in its copyright fight against Megaupload, alleged to be one of the Web's largest distributors of pirated films, TV shows, and music. A U.S. District Court Judge refused to throw out claims that Megaupload is liable for direct copyright infringement as well as contributory infringement.
A 21-year-old who bragged about hacking into Miley Cyrus' email account and distributing revealing pictures of her pleaded guilty in federal court to unrelated charges of credit card fraud and hacking. Josh Holly pleaded to having about 200 credit card numbers and to commercial electronic mail message fraud in a scheme to spam visitors to celebrities' MySpace pages.
A U.S. trade panel that hears patent disputes has agreed to investigate Apple Inc's complaint that mobile phones and tablets made by South Korean rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd violate its technology intellectual property. The world's most valuable technology company and Samsung are waging an escalating legal battle in multiple countries, accusing each other of infringing on technology and design patents as competition in the red-hot mobile gadgets arena intensifies.
Thousands of people who entered competitions on The Sun website have been warned that their personal information may have been stolen. The paper's publisher, News Group, said the data was taken when the site was hacked on 19 July.
Zediva, the video service that attempted to build a business by exploiting loopholes in copyright law, suffered a serious setback when a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the service. U.S. District Judge John Walter has ruled that Zediva violates copyright infringement and granted a preliminary injunction motion made by the Motion Picture Association of America for Zediva to be shut down.
NTP Inc., the patent licenser that extracted a $612.5 million settlement from Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) in a dispute over wireless e-mail technology five years ago, won an appeals court ruling in a battle over the validity of its patents as the company sues other smartphone makers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ordered the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reconsider findings that invalidated elements of seven NTP patents, while upholding the rejection of an eighth.
HTC Corp., the Taiwanese smartphone maker locked in a patent battle with competitor Apple Inc., sued the iPhone maker in Britain. The complaint, filed July 29 in London, comes two weeks after HTC lost a ruling against Apple at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Notice of the U.K. case didn’t specify the nature of the new lawsuit.
Microsoft has ceased publishing the estimated locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other devices with Wi-Fi connections around the world after a CNET article highlighted privacy concerns. The decision to rework Live.com's geolocation service comes following scrutiny of the way Microsoft made available its database assembled by both Windows Phone 7 phones and what the company calls "managed driving" by Street View-like vehicles that record Wi-Fi signals accessible from public roads.
As Internet giants Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. race to expand their facial-recognition abilities, new research shows how powerful, and potentially detrimental to privacy, these tools have become. Armed with nothing but a snapshot, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh successfully identified about one-third of the people they tested, using a powerful facial-recognition technology recently acquired by Google.
A teenager arrested on suspicion of hacking activities was released by a London court on bail but was prohibited from using the Internet. Police allege Jake Davis, 18, is the spokesperson for the online hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous, and goes by the alias "Topiary," among others, on the Web.
Apple Inc. won an agreement from Samsung Electronics Co. that the South Korean company won’t sell the newest version of its tablet computer in Australia until a patent lawsuit in the country is resolved. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringes 10 Apple patents, including the “look and feel,” and touchscreen technology of the iPad, Steven Burley, a lawyer for Apple, told Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett in Sydney.
Cash-strapped states seeking to collect billions in taxes from online transactions gained an ally in Washington when a senator introduced a bill for a federal solution to the problem. Although the fate of the bill by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin was uncertain given the anti-tax environment on Capitol Hill, his measure is backed by the National Governors Association and the National Retail Federation and even earned a pledge of cooperation from giant online retailer Amazon.
According to a recently emailed message from Amazon, the company has decided to stop accepting new application submissions in Germany as a direct result of Apple's legal actions over the "App Store" trademark. And there's no indication as to when Amazon might flip the switch back on, save for the note that Amazon plans to fight Apple's claims with great vigor.
Google Inc. has purchased more than 1,000 patents from IBM to defend itself from an onslaught of patent litigation. Its anemic intellectual property portfolio has made it vulnerable to legal assault, said technology patent valuation specialist Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of General Patent Corp.
Microsoft Corp. must pay $70 million for infringing an Alcatel-Lucent patent used in versions of Microsoft’s Outlook program and two other applications, a federal jury in San Diego said. Alcatel-Lucent, France’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, asked for as much as $75 million in damages.
Hackers with the loose-knit group Anonymous said they had broken into the network of U.S. government contractor Mantech International Corp and posted some NATO-related correspondence online. Anonymous, tweeting as AnonymousIRC, offered the correspondence between Mantech and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as proof of the breach.
Facebook filed a lawsuit against several companies that bought domain names similar to facebook.com, alleging trademark infringement. The dispute, which names 25 defendants, concerns domain names that are either typos or closely related to Facebook.com.
The U.K. High Court ordered telecommunications firm BT Group PLC to block access to a pirate website following legal action by an association representing six major movie studios. The ruling in favor of the Motion Picture Association paves the way for greater cooperation between content makers and Internet service providers in tackling piracy, even though ISPs so far have been loath to take on responsibility for the content provided through their networks.
The Department of Justice has requested more information from Google about its pending acquisition of online ad firm AdMeld, the search giant confirmed. Google said it has been working with DOJ for the last month since the agency is "obliged to review the transaction because of its purchase price." As a result, DOJ sent Google a "second request" for more data, Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising at Google, said in a blog post.
DOJ Taking Closer Look at Google, AdMeld Deal Chloe Albanesius By Chloe Albanesius
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AdMeld
The Department of Justice has requested more information from Google about its pending acquisition of online ad firm AdMeld, the search giant confirmed Wednesday.
Google said it has been working with DOJ for the last month since the agency is "obliged to review the transaction because of its purchase price." As a result, DOJ sent Google a "second request" for more data, Neal Mohan, vice president of display advertising at Google, said in a blog post.
"This doesn’t surprise us, as today’s display advertising industry is very new and highly complex," Mohan wrote. "But we’ll work to enable this review to be concluded as quickly as possible—display advertising is highly competitive and fast moving, and we don’t want our efforts to bring better services to our clients to be delayed."
Google announced plans to acquire AdMeld in June. Though it did not reveal a purchase price, the deal was reported to be worth about $400 million.
In the blog post, Mohan discussed why Google believed the acquisition will allow the market to remain competitive. He pointed to three recent deals in the space (a real-time bidding platform from Lijit Networks;ad firms integrating with ContextWeb; and AMP Exchange, a joint venture between Collective and AppNexus) and said analysts have noted that it's easy to switch suppliers.
"While the Department of Justice works to finish their review, it’s business as usual for our clients, and we’ll continue to actively work to improve our solutions for our partners in the display advertising space," Mohan concluded.
Google has been building its online advertising arsenal for some time. The search giant shelled out $3.1 billion for DoubleClick in 2007; the deal gained final approval in March 2008. In November 2009, Google announced plans to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob, and that deal was finalized in May 2010.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.
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