Samsung Electronics has filed new claims in its patent war with Apple Inc over alleged patent infringements in Germany, a spokesman for the company said. The tech giant added four patents to its ongoing infringement case related to the telecommunications standard technology WCDMA for 3G mobile handsets, which was filed in April, the spokesman said.
Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, was sued by British Telecommunications Plc for allegedly infringing six U.S. patents for mobile-device technology. BT, based in London, is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages against Mountain View, California-based Google, according to a complaint filed Dec. 15 in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
Yahoo! Inc., accused by Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. of reproducing news content without its permission, denied infringing the city-state’s copyright laws and countersued the newspaper publisher. The articles that Singapore Press claimed were reproduced without authorization were insubstantial and insignificant, Yahoo’s Southeast Asia unit said in a defense filed in the Singapore High Court.
In one of the more unusual cases involving gripe sites, two companies are attempting to force PissedConsumer.com to revise the way it encodes reviews in order to make them less prominent in search engine results. The companies -- software developer Ascentive and mattress manufacturer Classic Brands -- alleged in court papers that their trademark was violated by PissedConsumer because it used their companies' names in URLs like “ascentive.pissedconsumer.com.”
Facebook has landed in some legal hot water over its use of ads that snatch the names of members of the social network to promote a product or business. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., denied Facebook's request to dismiss a lawsuit over the practice of so-called sponsored stories. Such "stories," which started popping up this past January, create an ad based on the "likes" of a member's Facebook friends.
A federal jury failed to reach a verdict in a company's $1 billion antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. in a case so important to the computer giant that it put Bill Gates on the stand for two days last month. Novell Inc. of Utah sued the software giant in 2004, claiming Microsoft duped it into developing the once-popular WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own product.
The U.S. International Trade Commission said it will review in part an initial decision by an administrative law judge who in October ruled that Apple Inc. didn't violate four of HTC Corp.'s patents. The latest ITC statement came in days ahead of another, much-awaited ruling, in which Apple complained against HTC on some patents.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization will collect bids from some of the world's top defense companies, including Lockheed Martin Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., to update and expand the alliance's cybersecurity abilities. The €32 million ($42 million) contract, although valued at less than the price of one fighter jet, holds great significance because it cements the alliance's role in protecting cutting-edge infrastructure, say NATO officials.
Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students.
A key House vote on controversial anti-piracy legislation has been delayed. The House Judiciary Committee adjourned without deciding on whether or not to send the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor.
Facebook has threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg, an Israeli entrepreneur who recently took the social network founder’s name. The new Zuckerberg, born Rotem Guez, legally changed his name Dec. 7.
Officials announced new rules aimed at controlling the way Chinese Internet users post messages on social networking sites that have posed challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machinery. For many users, the most striking of the new rules requires people using the sites, called microblogs, or weibo in Chinese, to register with their real names and biographical information.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office planned to announce the indictment of 55 people who it said stole over $2 million as part of a cybercrime ring. Some of the ring’s major targets were donors to UJA-Federation of New York, including some of the city’s top philanthropists, whose financial information was stolen by an employee of the nonprofit organization, according to a person with direct knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a case with potentially far-reaching consequences for freedom of expression on the Internet, a federal judge dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of stalking a religious leader on Twitter, saying that the Constitution protects “uncomfortable” speech on such bulletin-board-like sites. The government had accused William Lawrence Cassidy of harassing and causing “substantial emotional distress” to a Buddhist religious leader named Alyce Zeoli.
Some of the original engineers of the Internet called for lawmakers to scrap anti-piracy bills, saying the proposals would pose major technological barriers for the Web and stifle new innovations. The letter comes as House Judiciary committee members debate the Stop Online Piracy Act introduced by Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) that has drawn impassioned support from media firms but opposition by Web firms and some public interest groups.
Facebook Inc. is rolling out a technical fix to try to block software that disrupts the site's advertising business and irritates users. The social-media site said that it was reviewing legal and technical options to address the software, which inserts an additional layer of ads on Web pages, pushing down content and ads sold by Facebook.
Two of the world's largest record companies joined a lawsuit against Grooveshark, an online music service they say infringes on their copyrights. The music companies, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and Access Industries Inc.'s Warner Music Group, joined in an amended complaint to a suit filed last month by Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Federal investigators are probing allegations that Carrier IQ software found on about 150 million cellphones tracked user activity and sent the information to the cellphone companies without informing consumers, according to government officials. Executives from Carrier IQ traveled to Washington and met with officials at the Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for protecting consumers and enforcing privacy laws.
The European Union’s competition regulator ended an antitrust investigation into International Business Machines after the company agreed to modify the way it supplied parts and information to rivals. The commission said it had accepted IBM’s offer to supply some spare parts and technical information to companies that service and maintain IBM mainframe computers on nondiscriminatory terms for five years.
Two bills, broadly supported on both sides of the political aisle, aim to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function. Naturally the howls of protest have been loud and lavishly financed, not only from Silicon Valley companies but also from public-interest groups, free-speech advocates and even venture capital investors.
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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.