Four YouTube videos that had apparently been taken down due to dubious copyright claims by the music publisher BMG Rights Management have once again become available to American audiences. The videos showed President Obama singing the opening line of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."
Sen. Al Franken grilled a Facebook Inc. executive on the company’s facial-recognition technology, urging the giant social network to be more upfront about how it is creating "face prints" of its users. Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, said it takes six clicks to reach a page on Facebook that explicitly says that the company is using facial-recognition technology. He held up placards with text from the site at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, which he chairs.
The caped crusader returns to movie theaters this week, but Internet advocates today launched their own bat signal for the Web. "The Internet Defense League is a network of people and sites who use their massive combined reach to defend the open Internet and make it better," the group said on its website.
Small-business owners whose bank accounts have been plundered by cyberthieves until recently had no one to blame but themselves. But two recent court rulings are giving those business owners new hope that banks which don't cater to their specific security needs may be held liable for funds stolen by hackers who increasingly have focused on attacking small businesses.
Twitter announced that it will appeal a recent ruling in an ongoing legal battle between the state of New York and a Twitter user, in which a judge ordered Twitter to hand over information on one of its users. The appeal comes shortly after New York County Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. ruled that Twitter must hand over a series of tweets sent by Malcolm Harris, a senior editor at online publication The New Inquiry and a protester in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The upper house of the Russian Parliament overwhelmingly approved draft laws that will give the government greater power over the Internet and nonprofit organizations. The measures, the latest in a series being rushed through as President Vladimir V. Putin begins a six-year term, will become law when Mr. Putin signs them, strengthening his hand against an increasingly assertive opposition.
After making remarks critical of the U.S. government's attempts to strengthen international copyright law, the judge at the center of MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom's extradition proceedings has stepped down from the case. New Zealand Judge David Harvey called the U.S. government "the enemy" at a conference.
Dropbox has called in an outside team of experts to help the company investigate spam targeted at its users that could be related to a possible breach. The cloud-storage company announced it had called in outside experts after many of its users began reporting spam being sent to email addresses specifically used for their Dropbox account, which may be a sign the company has been hacked and had an address book leak.
Apple Inc. was ordered by a judge to publish a notice on its U.K. website and in British newspapers alerting people to a ruling that Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy designs for the iPad. The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered designs, Judge Colin Birss said.
A U.S. judge rejected several requests by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to keep portions of key documents out of public view in their high-stakes patent litigation battle set for trial later this month. Apple and Samsung, the world's largest consumer electronics corporations, are waging legal war in several countries, accusing each other of patent violations as they vie for supremacy in a fast-growing market for mobile devices.
A German court has dismissed an Apple lawsuit seeking to ban the sale of Motorola's Xoom tablet computer throughout the European Union. In its case, Apple Inc claimed the Motorola product infringed its intellectual property because its design was too similar to the iPad.
Google unit Motorola Mobility said it has taken steps to avert an interruption of U.S. imports and sales of its smartphones after the devices were found to infringe on a Microsoft patent. The importation to the United States of some Motorola Mobility smartphones was supposed to stop as the result of an International Trade Commission ruling that the phones infringed on technology that makes it possible for consumers to use the devices to generate meeting requests and schedule gatherings.
Google has submitted a revised package of concessions to address the concerns of Europe’s top competition authority, bringing the talks to settle the EU antitrust investigation to a critical juncture. Joaquin Almunia, the EU’s competition commissioner, recently spoke to Eric Schmidt, the Google chairman, and requested the US group clarify some elements of its informal offer submitted two weeks ago.
EU antitrust regulators have opened an investigation into whether Microsoft is complying with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer users a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said.
A federal judge dismissed the final legal claims by a Utah company that sued Microsoft Corp. for $1 billion over the WordPerfect writing program. U.S. District Judge Frederick Motz ruled that Novell has no viable claims left after losing an eight-week trial against Microsoft in Salt Lake City last year.
Republican governors, eager for new revenue to ease budget strains, are dropping their longtime opposition to imposing sales taxes on online purchases, a significant political shift that could soon bring an end to tax-free sales on the Internet. Conservative governors, joining their Democratic counterparts, have been making deals with online retail giant Amazon.com to collect state sales taxes.
The European Union’s antitrust chief said he’d rather settle an antitrust probe over claims Google Inc. discriminates against rivals than pursue an enforcement action against the world’s largest Web-search engine. “In these fast-moving markets with new activities, new products and new services, I prefer to find remedies as soon as possible and this is easier,” EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in an interview, referring to a settlement.
Japan's Fujifilm has sued Google's Motorola Mobility, claiming that several of its cell phones and tablets infringe on four of its patents related to digital camera and photography technology. Fujifilm, which filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, said its filing came after attempts to negotiate a licensing deal with Motorola failed.
A northern California jury directed Research in Motion Ltd to pay $147.2 million in patent litigation over a remote management system for wireless devices, according to an attorney for the plaintiff, Mformation Technologies Inc. Amar Thakur, an attorney for Mformation, said the jury directed RIM to pay an $8 royalty for every BlackBerry device connected to RIM's enterprise server software, which brings the total award to $147.2 million.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into ZTE Corp's sale of banned U.S. computer equipment to Iran, a website reported, as the Chinese telecoms gear maker warned its first half net profit could fall as much as 80 percent. The federal investigations stem from a Reuters report in March that Shenzhen-based ZTE sold Iran's largest telecoms firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile and Internet communications, the Smoking Gun website reported.
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.