Google has been told it is running out of time to improve its offer to settle a European Union investigation into anti-competitive behavior or face formal charges that could lead to a hefty fine. EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia rejected the Internet search giant's latest concessions and warned that it has only a short time left to make a satisfactory offer.
Pandora Media Inc. lost a bid in a licensing dispute with songwriters group Broadcast Music Inc. to gain access to works that had been excluded from the group’s new media offerings. The group, which manages music performance rights, had allowed affiliate publishers to withdraw their works from licensing for Internet services.
The U.S. International Trade Commission found that Huawei Technologies, Nokia Corp and ZTE Corp did not infringe cell phone patents owned by InterDigital Inc. InterDigital, a wireless research and development company, had accused the companies of violating seven patents used to make 3G wireless devices.
In its eighth biannual Transparency Report, Google once again observes a rise in government requests to remove content that's critical of government behavior, even though the company is fighting government opposition to transparency and pushing for limits to secret government data gathering. Susan Infantino, legal director at Google, wrote in a blog post that government requests to remove political content have been a consistent concern for the company.
Hackers broke into The Washington Post’s servers and gained access to employee user names and passwords, marking at least the third intrusion over the past three years, company officials said. The extent of the loss of company data was not immediately clear, although officials planned to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords on the assumption that many or all of them may have been compromised.
Spain's privacy watchdog fined Google for breaking the country's data protection law when combining personal information from its many different online services and failing to inform users clearly on how it uses their data. Although the 900,000 euro ($1.23 million) fine is modest for Google, which has a market capitalization of over $350 billion, the move reflects growing concerns across Europe about the volume of personal data that is held in foreign jurisdictions in so-called "cloud" storage services.
Payment card data was stolen from an unknown number of Target Corp. customers starting on the busy Black Friday weekend in a major breach at the U.S. retailer, according to a person familiar with the matter. Investigators believe the data was obtained via software installed on machines that customers use to swipe magnetic strips on their cards when paying for merchandise at Target stores, according to the person who was not authorized to discuss the matter and declined to provide further details.
Apple Inc. had its wrist slapped by Australia’s consumer watchdog after claims it misled consumers about its obligation to replace or repair faulty products such as iPhones and iPads. Following an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the technology giant agreed to bring the warranty on the goods it sells in line with Australia’s laws.
China’s biggest Bitcoin exchange was forced to stop accepting deposits in the Chinese currency, sending the price of the virtual money tumbling in one of its biggest markets globally. The exchange, BTC China, made the announcement in a post on its verified account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like messaging service.
Italian lawmakers have revised proposed legislation that would raise revenue from online companies including Google and Amazon, but its passage is still uncertain as the leader of the main ruling party said it should be scrapped. Prime Minister Enrico Letta's government last month proposed the law, dubbed the "Google tax", that would oblige companies that advertise and sell online in Italy to do so only through agencies with a tax presence in the country.
The U.S. Treasury Department's anti money-laundering unit is warning businesses linked to the digital currency Bitcoin that they may have to comply with federal law and regulation as money transmitters, a Treasury spokesman said. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has sent "industry outreach" letters to about a dozen firms, regarding potential anti-money laundering compliance obligations related to Bitcoin businesses, FinCEN spokesman Steve Hudak told Thomson Reuters' regulatory information service Compliance Complete.
The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities. Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.
Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility unit lost an appeals court bid to invalidate a patent Microsoft Corp. used to win a ban on U.S. imports of some mobile phones. Motorola Mobility failed to prove the technology covered by Microsoft’s patent was previously used in Apple Inc.’s failed Newton personal digital assistant of the 1990s, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington said in an opinion.
The Energy Department blocked about 2,200 attempts this year by users seeking to get data from its websites in ways that endangered equal access to the agency's widely followed economic reports. The users were blocked because they asked for too much information or submitted too many requests for data, exceeding limits set by the agency.
British Internet users who believe their privacy was breached by Google tracking their online activity and targeting them with personalized advertisements have the right to sue for damages in the UK, the High Court has heard. A group, known as known as Safari Users Against Google's Secret Tracking, have launched a test case in which they accuse the web giant of bypassing security settings in order to collect information on their browsing habits.
Canada's Competition Bureau has filed a legal motion against Google Inc. alleging that the company is abusing its dominant position in online search, joining U.S. and European antitrust authorities in challenging the practices of the web giant. The bureau commissioner, in a federal court filing dated December 11., is seeking an order requiring Google hand over information about its business practices, including contracts.
About 20,000 people who watched pornography on a U.S.-based website have had their names and addresses mistakenly released by a court and are now being ordered to pay fines, a lawyer said. Cease and desist letters were sent to people whose IP addresses were detected on the porn site Redtube after a German court released their personal details in a copyright infringement case.
AT&T has added a new invention to its portfolio: technology that can detect, block and ban file-sharers on a network. Based on network activities, a user is assigned a "risk class" which, upon further monitoring, can result in file-sharing website access blockades, as reported by TorrentFreak.
Activist investors have asked Amazon.com Inc. to review its sales of firearms accessories, concerned that the online retailer offers products that could be used to convert semi-automatic rifles into weapons that fire too rapidly to be legal. The shareholder scrutiny of the world's largest online retailer came a day before the anniversary of the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 26 people.
Intellectual Ventures has settled a patent lawsuit against chipmaker Altera Corp, leaving Xilinx Inc as the only remaining defendant in a case in which IV had claimed infringement by four semiconductor companies, according to court documents. Intellectual Ventures, which has purchased billions of dollars worth of patents, sued Altera for patent infringement in December 2010.
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