Electronic Arts Inc. reached a proposed settlement agreement in a class-action lawsuit over whether it violated antitrust laws by establishing exclusive licensing agreements for its football videogames. The agreement, disclosed by Seattle-based class-action law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, establishes a $27 million fund for consumers who purchased "Madden" NFL, AFL or NCAA football games published by EA.
Defense attorneys for two boys who pleaded guilty to assaulting a 17-year-old Savannah Dietrich have withdrawn their motion that she be held in contempt for tweeting the names of her attackers in defiance of a court order. David Mejia, an attorney for one of the teens, said now that the Louisville teen’s story has gone global because of a Courier-Journal article there was no reason to continue the contempt motion.
NTP, which some say held the mobile world hostage with its e-mail patents, has signed an agreement that will let companies including Google, Apple, and Microsoft use its patent for allowing e-mail services on handsets. The company announced in a press release that it has reached a mutual resolution with 13 companies, including wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile; smartphone manufacturers Apple, HTC, Motorola Mobility, Palm, LG, and Samsung; and e-mail service and software providers Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Not surprisingly, bookstore owners and authors make up a large number of the people who filed comments with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the government's antitrust case against Apple and e-book publishers. The DOJ posted copies of the more than 800 comments on its Web site.
Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook and top Samsung Electronic Co Ltd executives disagreed last week on the value of each other's patents at a settlement conference ahead of a high profile U.S. trial, according to a source familiar with the matter. 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 the fast-growing market for mobile devices.
Apple Inc. and Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility unit filed separate appeals of a federal judge’s June 22 order dismissing their mutual patent- infringement claims. U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner threw out the companies’ claims about two weeks after he rejected each mobile- phone maker’s damages theories and canceled a jury trial that had been set for June 11 in federal court in Chicago.
Eastman Kodak Co. has lost a patent case against Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., dealing a blow to the onetime film giant's efforts to raise billions of dollars by selling off its intellectual property. Kodak filed a complaint against the iPhone and BlackBerry makers at the U.S. International Trade Commission in early 2010, saying their devices infringed on its patent for previewing images with a digital camera.
A federal appeals court refused to lift a preliminary injunction that banned sales of Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy Tab 10.1 touchscreen tablet computer at the request of Apple Inc. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., issued the injunction last month after finding Apple had made a strong case that Samsung violated its design patent.
The main public library in San Francisco has been stung by complaints about content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a Russian man has been arrested in Cyprus in connection with attacks on Amazon.com. The man, Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha, 25, of Moscow, was arrested July 18 on an international warrant. Zubakha was indicted in May of 2011 for launching two denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the Amazon Web site. The indictment, which was unsealed Thursday, also links him to other DoS attacks on Priceline.com and eBay.
Federal agencies should share airwaves with commercial users to ease a shortage of frequencies and help meet surging demand from wireless smartphones and other mobile devices, a White House advisory panel said. President Barack Obama should have U.S. agencies identify twice as much spectrum for shared use as he directed in a 2010 memorandum setting mobile-computing growth as a national priority, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in a letter and report.
EU regulators, investigating Google for alleged anti-competitive behavior, want the internet search giant to offer concessions that cover all platforms, including computers, tablets and mobile devices, two people familiar with the issue said. If Google is not able to provide satisfactory concessions, it will face charges and potentially severe fines, the EU's competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, has said.
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.
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.