Apple Inc. has removed a mobile app, called “Jew or Not Jew?”, from its online App Store in France. The app let users consult a database of celebrities and public figures to determine if they are Jewish or not. Its removal follows a complaint from a French anti-racism group that threatened to sue the iPhone and iPad maker.
As copyright and trademark owners continue to make their case for stronger laws to go after online pirates and counterfeites, a top executive with Paramount Pictures detailed how easy it is for users to find and stream movies and other content online. With four clicks, Paramount's chief operating officer Frederick Huntsberry pulled up a new movie and began streaming it at a a symposium on online intellectual property theft hosted by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.
Six of the biggest names in technology have lined up behind EMC Corp. and other companies caught up in a patent case that highlights a controversy over filing infringement charges against many unrelated defendants. Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Yahoo Inc. and SAP AG's U.S. unit filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, expressing support for EMC's appeal of a patent case brought by Oasis Research LLC. Oasis filed the suit in 2010 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas against 18 defendants.
Consumer and privacy advocacy groups in the U.S. and Europe sent a letter to Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., citing concerns that a privacy hearing Mack will convene is being staged to give short shrift to how Europe has championed privacy rights for individual citizens. The hearing, titled "Internet Privacy: The Impact and Burden of EU Regulation," will be held before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, chaired by Bono Mack.
U.S. prosecutors have launched a criminal probe into whether eBay employees took confidential information from classified ad website Craigslist as eBay sought to build a rival service, a copy of a grand jury subpoena obtained by Reuters shows. The two companies have been feuding for years in civil court over allegations that online giant eBay took a stake in Craigslist and then misappropriated confidential information while it secretly planned its own classifieds site.
In the wake of last year's data collection controversy, Google said that it will allow users to opt out of having their Wi-Fi location data tracked. "At the request of several European data protection authorities, we are building an opt-out service that will allow an access point owner to opt out from Google's location services," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel.
Three major authors’ groups and eight individual authors filed suit against a partnership of research libraries and five universities, arguing that their initiative to digitize millions of books constituted copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that “by digitizing, archiving, copying and now publishing the copyrighted works without the authorization of those works’ rights holders, the universities are engaging in one of the largest copyright infringements in history.”
Samsung has filed a patent complaint against Apple in France. It claims its U.S. rival infringed on three mobile technology patents in the iPhone and iPad.
The microblogging service Twitter has suspended ad network Twittad and taken the company to court over the use of the word 'tweets' in its "Let your ad meet tweets" service. Twittad was awarded a trademark on the name in 2008, but Twitter argues that the trademark should be invalidated because the word Tweet was already associated with Twitter by then.
SAP AG has agreed to pay $20 million to resolve a criminal probe into allegations that it downloaded millions of files from rival Oracle, according to a source familiar with the matter. U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors last week charged SAP's defunct TomorrowNow Inc unit with 12 criminal counts in connection with illegal downloads of Oracle software files, according to court documents.
Dolby Laboratories said it has withdrawn its patent infringement lawsuit against Research In Motion after the BlackBerry maker inked a licensing deal to use of some of Dolby's technologies. In June, Dolby sued RIM for using its audio compression technologies in its smartphones and PlayBook tablets without proper licenses.
The computer hackers, chat room denizens and young people who comprise the loosely affiliated Internet collective have increasingly turned to questionable tactics, drawing the attention of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal investigators. What was once a small group of pranksters has become a potential national security threat, federal officials say.
Russia's embassy in London said its website crashed in a suspected hacking attack just before Prime Minister David Cameron begins the first visit by a British leader to Moscow since the 2006 killing in London of a Kremlin critic. The embassy said it had set up a "mirror" website to meet the increased interest of the public and media for information before Cameron flies to Russia.
The FBI is investigating the NBC News Twitter account hacking committed by perpetrators who posted bogus information about the hijacking of a civilian airliner that supposedly crashed into Ground Zero in New York, officials said. A posting on the NBC News Twitter profile accompanying the attack indicated the perpetrators may have been members of a new group of cyber pranksters known as "The Script Kiddies," whose main goal appears to be targeting mainstream news organizations.
Two researchers who set up doppelganger domains to mimic legitimate domains belonging to Fortune 500 companies say they managed to vacuum up 20 gigabytes of misaddressed e-mail over six months. The intercepted correspondence included employee usernames and passwords, sensitive security information about the configuration of corporate network architecture that would be useful to hackers, affidavits and other documents related to litigation in which the companies were embroiled, and trade secrets, such as contracts for business transactions.
Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable technology company, won backing from a German court for a ban on sales of Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet computer in the country. A Dusseldorf court upheld the temporary sales ban it issued Aug. 9, rejecting Samsung’s bid to overturn it for the most part.
Google is telling people in Iran to change their passwords and take other security precautions in the wake of an Internet attack in which the google.com domain was spoofed. "We learned last week that the compromise of a Dutch company involved with verifying the authenticity of websites could have put the Internet communications of many Iranians at risk, including their Gmail," Eric Grosse, Google's vice president of security engineering, wrote in a blog post.
Entrepreneurial techies have been selling thousands of smartphone apps that claim to treat acne for 99¢ and $1.99 a pop (excuse the pun). Now, however, a Federal Trade Commission investigation reveals that (shocker!) the claims -- that weird colored lights emitted from one’s smartphone could eliminate pimples -- have no scientific basis.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, introduced a new bill that aims to protect citizens’ personal information from online data breaches. The bill would also punish companies that are careless with customers’ information. “The goal of the proposed law is essentially to hold accountable the companies and entities that store personal information and personal data and to deter data breaches,” Senator Blumenthal said in a phone interview.
Five people who were fired from their jobs after posting complaints on Facebook about working conditions will now be able to return their positions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal organization that safeguards employee rights, announced. Administrative law Judge Arthur Amchan ruled on the case between the five employees and their former employer, Hispanics United of Buffalo.
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.