Apple Wants Standards Body to Set Licensing Principles

Apple Inc. has asked a telecommunications standards body to set basic principles governing how member companies license their patents, an increasingly contentious topic for rivals in the smartphone industry. In a letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Apple said the telecommunications industry lacks consistent licensing schemes for the many patents necessary to make mobile devices, and offered suggestions for setting appropriate royalty rates that all members would follow.

Google Plans 'Fair' Licensing for Motorola Patents

Google Inc., the largest maker of smartphone software, plans to send a letter to standards organizations reassuring them it will license Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. patents on a fair and reasonable basis, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. The move would come after a deadline passed for Google to submit remedies to the European Commission, which is evaluating the plan to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

German Police to Use Facebook to Find Missing Persons

Police in the German state of Lower-Saxony will soon use their networks of Facebook "friends" to find missing persons and hunt out suspected criminals, according to the state's interior minister. The decision to use social media in manhunts follows the completion of a pilot scheme in the northern city of Hanover last year which drew sharp criticism from data protection groups.

In Sting, Symantec Offered Hacker $50,000 to Protect Code

As part of a sting operation, Symantec told a hacker group that it would pay $50,000 to keep the source code for some of the its flagship security products off the Internet, the company confirmed to CNET. An e-mail exchange revealing the extortion attempt posted to Pastebin today shows a purported Symantec employee named Sam Thomas negotiating payment with an individual named "Yamatough" to prevent the release of PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus code.

Motorola Wants Apple to Pay Royalty on iPhones, iPads

Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. asked Apple Inc. to pay a potential royalty of 2.25% of sales for some iPhones and iPads last year, representing possibly billions of dollars in licensing fees. In a letter filed in a California court last month, a lawyer said Motorola, which is being acquired by Google Inc., had "demanded" the royalty for a license of its patents.

Law Student Leads European Campaign Against Facebook

Max Schrems, a law student at the University of Vienna and a user of Facebook since 2008, has led a vocal campaign in Europe against what he maintains are Facebook’s illegal practices of collecting and marketing users’ personal data, often without consent. In less than a year, Mr. Schrems’s one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them.

Motorola Didn't Delete Data from Used Devices

To the list of woes buffeting Motorola Mobility’s little-loved Xoom tablet, add this: the company sold a batch of used ones without first wiping out all the prior owners’ personal data. Motorola Mobility said 100 of about 6,200 it sold through Woot.com from October to December still may have contained email and social media account passwords as well as other personal ephemera.

Google, Facebook Remove Content from Indian Sites

Internet giants Google and Facebook removed content from some Indian domain websites following a court directive warning them of a crackdown "like China" if they did not take steps to protect religious sensibilities. The two are among 21 companies ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after private petitioners took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

Samsung Optimistic About EU's Antitrust Probe

Samsung Electronics Co., in its first acknowledgment of the European Commission's antitrust investigation of its patent licensing practices, said it believed the commission would ultimately conclude the company complies with the rules. The investigation arose out of Samsung's dispute with Apple Inc. over trademarks and patents that cover smartphones and tablet computers.

EU Wants Google to Delay Changes to Privacy Policies

European governments, supported by the top justice official in the European Union, are pressing Google to halt coming changes to its privacy policies while they investigate the implications for personal data protection. The move is a shot across the bow for a range of companies, including Facebook, that rely on the European market of 500 million people for a hefty chunk of their business.

Rift Grows as Countries Debate How to Fight Hackers

With worries growing over computer hacking, data theft and the risk of digital attacks destroying essential systems, western states and their allies are co-operating closer than ever on cyber security. But as they do so, the gulf between them and China and Russia -- blamed for many recent hacks and with a very different and much more authoritarian view over the future of the Internet -- grows ever wider.

'Anonymous' Publishes Confidential FBI Phone Call

Internet activist group Anonymous published a recording of a confidential call between FBI agents and London detectives in which the law-enforcement agents discuss action they are taking against hacking. British police said they were investigating reports of the illegally recorded call, and the FBI said a criminal investigation was under way into the incident.

Commerce Dep't Agency Hit by Computer Virus

A virus has attacked the computer network of a job-development agency in the Commerce Department, forcing it to block employees from the Internet for nine days. The attack, discovered two weeks ago, targeted computers at the Economic Development Administration, which is responsible for making business-development grants to distressed communities to help them create jobs.

S. Korea Indicts Man for Retweeting N. Korean Posts

South Korean prosecutors indicted a social media and freedom-of-speech activist for reposting messages from the North Korean government’s Twitter account. Park Jung-geun, 23, a photographer who specialized in taking pictures of babies, was detained last month on charges of violating South Korea’s controversial National Security Law, which bans “acts that benefit the enemy” -- North Korea -- but does not clearly define what constitutes such acts.

VeriSign Says Hackers Stole Undisclosed Data

VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world's websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.

Prosecutors Seize 16 Illegal Sports Broadcasting Sites

Three days before Super Bowl XLVI, federal prosecutors said they have seized 16 websites that illegally streamed live sports and pay-per-view events over the Internet, and charged a Michigan man with running nine of those websites. According to the government, the 16 websites provided links to give viewers easy access to other sites that hosted pirated telecasts from the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc ("WWE") and TNA Impact Wrestling.

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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.