The structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 Java APIs at question in the Oracle v. Google case are not copyrightable, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California said in a ruling. However, it's a narrow ruling that only covers the APIs at question in the copyright phase of this case.
Google Inc. accused Microsoft Corp. and Nokia of conspiring to use their patents against smartphone industry rivals, and said it has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission. In its complaint, Google claimed Microsoft and Nokia, which cooperate on smartphone technology and production, transferred 1,200 patents for assertion to a group called MOSAID, which the company called a "patent troll" -- a term referring to a holder of patents that litigates them aggressively.
Lawmakers said they are united when it comes to keeping the Internet free from centralized control and preventing the United Nations from gaining power over Web content and infrastructure. The U.S. government wants to bring as much ammunition as possible to a December meeting in Dubai where delegations from 193 countries will discuss whether to hand governance of the Internet over to the United Nations.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, speaking at the D10 conference, called on technology companies to implement three things to protect consumer privacy. Acknowledging that tech vendors are doing better today at building privacy into apps, what he called, "privacy by design," he said that most companies actually want to design with consumer protection in mind.
The government’s complaint “piles innuendo on top of innuendo.” It is based “entirely on the little circumstantial evidence it was able to locate.” And it “sides with a monopolist.” These arguments were part of a response by two publishers, Penguin Group USA and Macmillan, to a Justice Department lawsuit filed in April that accused five major publishing houses of conspiring with Apple to fix the price of e-books.
Security experts have only begun examining the thousands of lines of code that make up Flame, an extensive, data-mining computer virus that has been designed to steal information from computers across the Middle East, but already digital clues point to its creators and capabilities. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, which first reported the virus, believe Flame was written by a different group of programmers from those who had created other malware directed at computers in the Middle East, particularly those in Iran.
The legal fight over the U.S. government's new Internet traffic rules will likely drag into next year, according to a proposed court schedule. The Federal Communications Commission in 2010 adopted "net neutrality" rules that forbid broadband providers from blocking access to lawful content, while leaving flexibility for providers to manage their networks.
The Korea Fair Trade Commission raided Google’s offices in Seoul, people familiar with the matter say. This is the second time the agency has busted in on Google’s South Korean headquarters, and appears to be a response to the search behemoth’s resistance to the KFTC’s Android-related antitrust investigation. Sources say the agency believes Google impeded its probe by deleting documents and asking employees to telecommute while it was occurring.
U.S. lawmakers will delve into an international debate on whether to hand more control of the Internet to the United Nations, a move many fear would turn it into a political bargaining chip for censorship and global taxes on Web companies. U.S. government officials are gearing up for a December meeting in Dubai where delegations from 193 countries will discuss whether the UN should have more say over how the Internet is organized and controlled.
Internet-service providers and financial-services companies would share data about networks of infected computers known as botnets under a pilot program announced by the Obama administration. The White House also unveiled a voluntary set of principles developed by an industry group to prevent and detect botnets and a consumer-education campaign about the computer viruses.
Facebook has received notice that U.S. antitrust regulators will give its proposed purchase of the popular photo-sharing app maker Instagram a lengthy investigation, an industry source said. Facebook has received a "second request" from the Federal Trade Commission, essentially a request for relatively large amounts of data that the regulators will sift through to ensure that the deal complies with antitrust law.
A Thai web editor is due to hear whether she will be jailed for hosting defamatory postings about the monarchy on her website, amid a growing clamour for the law to be changed. The case has stirred fierce debate in Thailand, where strict laws against defaming the royal family have prompted accusations that authorities are trampling on free speech.
A United Nations agency charged with helping member nations secure their national infrastructures plans to issue a sharp warning about the risk of the Flame virus that was recently discovered in Iran and other parts of the Middle East. "This is the most serious (cyber) warning we have ever put out," said Marco Obiso, cyber security coordinator for the U.N.'s Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union.
A French court ruled that Google is not responsible for filtering content on YouTube, dealing a blow to French broadcaster TF1 which sought damages for copyrighted sports and movies which ended up on the video-sharing website. TF1 claimed 141 million euros in damages but was ordered to pay 80,000 euros of Google's legal fees.
Arizona man David Elliott wants a court to declare that “google” is a word that means “search on the internet” and to cancel Google’s trademarks for the term. Elliott filed the complaint after Google won a ruling this month that forced him to hand over more than 750 website names such as “googlegaycruises.com” and “googledonaldtrump.com.”
Months after the success of the virtual protests against the SOPA online piracy bill, the nonprofit group Fight for the Future is forming the Internet Defense League -- an organization of people who support Internet freedom and have pledged to fight for it using whatever powers they have. "The Internet Blackout was just the beginning," the league founders write on a Web page announcing the project.
One of China’s largest hosts of Twitter-like microblogs decreed new punishments for users who post comments that its editors -- and by extension, China’s government censors -- deem inappropriate. The service, Sina Weibo, imposed “user contracts” that award each of its 300 million microbloggers a starting score of 80 points.
Security experts said a highly sophisticated computer virus is infecting computers in Iran and other Middle East countries and may have been deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored cyber espionage. Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran's nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that took credit for discovering the infections.
Google released a new picture of the millions of links it scrubs from its search results in response to requests from Microsoft, movie studios and other content owners. In a reflection of the evolving nature of anti-piracy enforcement, the company revealed that it takes down 250,000 search links each week over copyright concerns, a figure that exceeds the total number it removed in all of 2009.
Telecoms equipment maker Huawei has called for EU antitrust regulators to intervene in a dispute with InterDigital, saying the U.S.-based firm is demanding "exploitative" fees for use of its 3G mobile phone patents. Huawei filed a complaint with the European Commission, after failing to reach a deal with the wireless technology patent holder, making it the latest company to take a patent grievance to the EU watchdog.
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