An Australian appeals court judge questioned the fairness of a ruling that granted Apple Inc.’s request to ban the sale of the iPad2’s biggest rival in a legal dispute with Samsung Electronics Co. over patent infringement. “The result looks terribly fair to Apple and not terribly fair to Samsung,” Federal Court Justice Lindsay Foster said at a hearing in Sydney on Samsung’s appeal for the ban to be overturned.
German patent firm IPCom plans to halt as quickly as possible the sale of all HTC smartphones in Germany, another blow to the Taiwanese firm just two days after it shocked markets by cutting its fourth-quarter outlook. IPCom said it would enforce an injunction based on a Mannheim court decision from February 2009 after HTC, the fourth largest smartphone vendor globally, withdrew its appeal.
German drug maker Merck KGaA has asked a New York City court to force Facebook Inc. to explain how the German company lost its page on the social-networking site to U.S.-based rival Merck & Co. According to a filing in New York State Supreme Court, the German Merck intends to "initiate action based on the apparent takeover of its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/merck" by Merck & Co., the similarly named but separate competitor.
South Korea's communications regulator said that personal information of more than 13 million subscribers of a popular online game of Nexon Korea Corp, a leading game developer in the country, had been leaked in a hacking attack. The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said in a statement Nexon reported to the commission that the company discovered the leakage of personal data of its online game Maple Story's 13.2 million subscribers.
Philippine police and the FBI have arrested four people over a hacking operation that targeted customers of U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T to funnel money to a Saudi-based militant group. Those arrested in Manila were paid by the same group the Federal Bureau of Investigation accuses of having funded the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, the Philippines' Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) said.
The U.S. government has seized 131 domains allegedly associated with counterfeiting- and piracy-related websites, reports TorrentFreak. The action signals that U.S. authorities have resumed “Operation In Our Sites”, a joint initiative between the Department of Justice and Immigration and Customs Enforcement that aims to stop online piracy and counterfeit item sales by assuming control of a site’s domain name.
The highest court in the European Union said that Internet service providers could not be required to monitor their customers’ online activity to filter out the illegal sharing of music and other copyrighted material. The ruling, by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, is a setback for a Belgian group representing music copyright owners, which had sought tougher measures to crack down on online file sharing.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said there is nothing to suggest that a recent pump failure at a Springfield, Ill. water utility was caused by a cyberattack as previously reported by an industrial control systems security expert. In a statement, DHS spokesman Chris Ortman said his agency and the FBI have completed a detailed analysis of the pump failure at the Curran-Gardner Public Water District in Springfield.
Apple has won its dispute with a domain name squatter and now is in control of iphonesex4s.com and six other names that contain the term "iPhone." Apple filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, aiming to gain control of the names.
Grooveshark.com said that a lawsuit accusing it of posting copyrighted music is based on a "gross mischaracterization of information." The comments came in response to a lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group accusing the music-sharing site of posting more than 100,000 pirated songs to its site.
EU regulators investigating Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics over their patents dispute are worried intellectual property rights may be unfairly used by some firms against their rivals, the EU antitrust chief said. The European Commission earlier this month asked Apple and Samsung for details on patents used as standards in the mobile telephone industry.
Microsoft's Windows 95 rollout presented the most challenges in the company's history, leading to several last-minute changes to technical features that would no longer support a rival software maker's word processor, Bill Gates testified in a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit filed by the creator of WordPerfect. Gates was the first witness to testify as Microsoft lawyers presented their case in the trial that's been ongoing in federal court in Salt Lake City for about a month.
The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled Apple Inc. products don't infringe on patents held by S3 Graphics, an acquisition target of HTC Corp. The commission reversed a preliminary ruling that some Apple products violated S3 patents involving texture compression, which is used in computer applications such as 3-D games. The panel said it found "no violation" by Apple and "the investigation is terminated."
AT&T Inc, the No. 2 U.S. mobile provider, said it is investigating an "organized and systemic attempt" to access wireless customers' information but that it did not believe any accounts were breached. The company, which had 100 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter, said it is advising less than 1 percent of its mobile customers that there was an attempt to obtain information about their accounts.
Software piracy in China isn’t going away anytime soon, but the effort to fight it looks as if it got a bit — just a bit — more serious, according to representatives of one of the industry’s main lobbying groups. The United States Commerce Department just released a summary of the results of a trade meeting between United States and Chinese government officials that occurred in Chengdu. Chinese officials made a number of commitments during the meeting to tackle what software makers believe is one of the worst and most fixable parts of the piracy problem in China: the use of unauthorized copies of software by government agencies and state-owned enterprises.
The federal organization overseeing the administration of funds from the 2008 bailout has cracked down on alleged scams that used Bing and Yahoo to lure vulnerable homeowners with ads for bogus mortgage modification deals. The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, shut down 85 alleged online mortgage scams that advertised with Google and targeted struggling homeowners.
Federal investigators are looking into a report that hackers managed to remotely shut down a utility's water pump in central Illinois, in what could be the first known foreign cyber attack on a U.S. industrial system. The Nov. 8 incident was described in a one-page report from the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center, according to Joe Weiss, a prominent expert on protecting infrastructure from cyber attacks.
A technology company is suing Motorola Mobility, alleging that the mobile device manufacturer stole source code for its cellular networks and phones. Lemko Corp. filed suit against Motorola Mobility in Cook County Circuit Court. The lawsuit is the latest twist in a convoluted and protracted court battle between Lemko and Motorola Inc., which split into two independent public companies in January.
In a copyright lawsuit, Universal Music Group says it has obtained e-mails and other records that show Grooveshark's leaders led an effort to post over 100,000 pirated songs onto the music service, CNET has learned. "[The business records of Escape Media Group, Grooveshark's parent company,] establish unequivocally," Universal's lawyers wrote in the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, "that the sound recordings illegally copied by Escape's executives and employees, include thousands of well known sound recordings owned by UMG."
The tide seems to have turned against the Stop Online Piracy Act, as both Nancy Pelosi and Darrell Issa have come out against passage. Congress, Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa said, is “realizing there are so many unintended consequences that they can’t just use Google as a piñata and bash on it here.”
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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.