A candid blog post at NPR’s All Songs Considered blog has touched off a small firestorm in the music industry over the behavior of young, “digital native” music fans and the right of musicians and record companies to be paid for their work. Fourteen years since the arrival of the game-changing Napster file-sharing service, these topics still touch a nerve.
A judge strongly questioned Apple Inc's request for an injunction against Google Inc's Motorola Mobility unit at a crucial hearing in the smartphone patent wars between the two technology companies. Federal Judge Richard Posner in Chicago said an injunction barring the sale of Motorola phones would have "catastrophic effects" on Motorola.
A Dutch court ordered Apple Inc to pay damages to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd over a patent violation in the Netherlands, the latest twist in the global legal battle waged by the two rival phone and computer makers. Apple and Samsung have been suing each other in about a dozen countries for the last few years as they compete globally for consumers in the fast-growing markets for smart phones and tablet computers.
Google denied that Street View data presented to a British regulator was "pre-prepared" and said it was "surprised" that the agency had reopened its investigation into the Web giant's data collection practices. The denial was in response to an Information Commissioner's Office letter sent that included additional questions to its 2010 investigation, saying it was motivated to reopen its probe after information provided in an earlier U.K. investigation appeared to have been contradicted by the Federal Communications Commission.
Google is cracking down on a website that strips music from YouTube videos and converts it to playable MP3s, which violates the video-sharing site's terms of service. The website, YouTube-MP3.org, received a cease-and-desist letter from Google, YouTube's parent company, and was given seven days to comply, according to TorrentFreak, which saw the letter.
The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort. The massive piece of malware secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending back a steady stream of intelligence to prepare for a cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials.
Photography pioneer Eastman Kodak Co sued Apple Inc to stop it from interfering with plans to sell a large patent portfolio, a significant part of its bankruptcy restructuring. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan, Kodak said Apple, the largest U.S. company by market value, wrongly claims to own 10 patents arising from work that the companies did together in the early 1990s.
InterDigital Inc said it had agreed to sell to Intel Corp about 1,700 wireless technology patents for $375 million, sending InterDigital shares up 27 percent. While Intel is pushing to expand its chip business beyond computers and into mobile devices, InterDigital for about a year has been seeking to capitalize on a surge in interest in wireless patents.
A hacker claiming to have broken into networks of dozens of banks and stolen customer data, has released as proof a file that contains names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers in plain text, but no credit card numbers.
An alliance of consumer rights groups pressed Facebook not to aim advertisements at preteen children or track their activities online if it formally opens its site to them. Facebook has millions of underage users who claim to be over the required age of 13, and the company has had discussions with some advocacy groups over how to keep children safe on the site if they insist on signing up.
Google Inc. received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world in the second half of last year to take down items such as YouTube videos and search listings, and it complied with them more than half the time, according to information provided by the company. Google plans to publish the data Monday in its Global Transparency Report, a biannual study the search giant started in 2010.
Despite attempts by privacy advocates, academics, law enforcement officials, technologists and advertisers to determine a person’s age on the Internet, the reality is that, online, it is extremely difficult to tell whether someone is an 11-year-old girl or a 45-year-old man. The question arose after Skout, a mobile social networking app, discovered that, within two weeks, three adults had masqueraded as teenagers in its forum for 13- to 17-year-olds.
Frustrated by their inability to stop sophisticated hacking attacks or use the law to punish their assailants, an increasing number of U.S. companies are taking retaliatory action. Known in the cyber security industry as "active defense" or "strike-back" technology, the reprisals range from modest steps to distract and delay a hacker to more controversial measures. Security experts say they even know of some cases where companies have taken action that could violate laws in the United States or other countries, such as hiring contractors to hack the assailant's own systems.
Facebook Inc has agreed to pay $10 million to charity to settle a lawsuit that accused the site of violating users' rights to control the use of their own names, photographs and likenesses, according to court documents. The lawsuit, brought by five Facebook members, alleged the social networking site violated California law by publicizing users' "likes" of certain advertisers on its "Sponsored Stories" feature without paying them or giving them a way to opt out, the documents said.
Over the past year, Myanmar’s government has ended its heavy censorship, allowing citizens unfettered access to a wide variety of Web sites that had been banned during military rule. When the government first began dismantling its Internet controls in August, visits to sites like YouTube soared. But as the poverty-stricken country of 55 million makes a delicate transition to democracy, hateful comments are also flourishing online about a Muslim ethnic group, the Rohingya, that is embroiled in sectarian clashes in western Myanmar that have left more than two dozen people dead.
A judge who effectively tossed patent claims and counterclaims between Apple and Google's Motorola unit has reversed himself, granting Apple's request for a new hearing on possible injunctions that would block sales of its rival's mobile products. Judge Richard Posner's ruling, in the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, also opens the door for Motorola to restate its case for similar injunctions against Apple.
In a sign of a stepped-up crackdown on the illegal pharmaceutical trade, U.S. authorities arrested Andrew Strempler, 38 years old, a pioneer of the Canadian Internet pharmacy industry, on charges related to the sale of foreign and counterfeit medicines, according to officials in Miami. Andrew Strempler, a pioneer of the Internet pharmacy trade implicated in selling counterfeit drugs to Americans, was arrested in Miami.
A handful of top Internet companies announced a joint effort to crack down on ads that promote counterfeit goods or include malware. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and AOL joined the Interactive Advertizing Bureau to create the Ads Integrity Alliance to coordinate efforts and share information to prevent bad ads from popping up on their websites.
After reporter Barrett Tryon posted a link to an article on his personal Facebook Timeline, his boss told him it violated the company’s social media policy. Tryon refused to remove it, sparking a whole conversation about the legality of social media policies — and landing himself on administrative leave.
It has been a little over three months since Apple appealed to the Higher People’s Court of Guangzhou, a lower Chinese court ruling that found it erroneously purchased the iPad China trademark from a Proview affiliate that didn’t have the right to sell it. But the Higher People’s Court of Guangzhou is withholding judgement on the case because its two players are in mediation talks.
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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.