A federal judge ordered Marvell Technology Group Ltd to pay nearly $1.54 billion for infringing two hard disk drive patents held by Carnegie Mellon University, nearly one-third more than a jury had previously awarded. The award, however, was less than half the maximum $3.75 billion that Carnegie Mellon had sought, though Marvell still plans an appeal.
After a long day of questioning, 10 jurors have been chosen to hear the latest patent infringement case between Apple and Samsung. The six-woman, four-man jury includes a number of iPhone owners as well as several people with ties to the tech industry.
The Federal Communications Commission approved measures that will free up more airwaves for Wi-Fi and wireless broadband. The commission allowed a broad swath of airwaves to be used for outdoor unlicensed broadband, clearing the way for a new generation of Wi-Fi networks and other uses of freely available airwaves.
U.S. Supreme Court justices stepped gingerly into a raging debate over computer software, voicing concerns about vaguely defined patents but signaling they would avoid any radical change to existing law. This may help tech companies fend off lawsuits filed by "patent trolls," defined as companies that hold patents only for the purpose of suing firms seeking to develop new products, but not as much as a broad ruling would.
A federal judge in New York granted class certification to a group of consumers who sued Apple Inc. for conspiring with five major publishers to fix e-book prices in violation of antitrust law. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said the plaintiffs had "more than met their burden" to allow them to sue as a group.
Google is claiming that ISPs in Turkey are intercepting their DNS service. The implication, unstated in Google's announcement, is that this is being done in order to block services such as YouTube and Twitter which are banned by the government.
The Federal Trade Commission said it had reached settlements with two companies whose mobile applications failed to live up to promises that they would secure the personal information of millions of customers. The companies—movie ticket seller Fandango and credit-monitoring service Credit Karma—must establish comprehensive security programs and undergo independent assessments every other year for 20 years, the FTC said.
BlackBerry Ltd won a preliminary injunction to ban Ryan Seacrest's Typo Products LLC from selling a $99 iPhone case after a judge agreed that television host's company had likely infringed on BlackBerry's patents. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said that the Canadian mobile phone maker had established a "likelihood" of proving that Typo infringed its patents, while mentioning that Typo had not sufficiently challenged the patents in question.
Microsoft will no longer snoop on customers’ private communications during investigations of stolen property, the company’s general counsel said. Instead, the general counsel, Brad Smith, said Microsoft would hand over any such investigations to law enforcement agencies.
The Pentagon is significantly growing the ranks of its cyberwarfare unit in an effort to deter and defend against foreign attacks on crucial U.S. networks, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said. In his first major speech on cyber policy, Hagel sought to project strength but also to tame perceptions of the United States as an aggressor in computer warfare, stressing that the government “does not seek to militarize cyberspace.”
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it has shut down a worldwide pyramid scheme that falsely promised fast gains to tens of thousands of Asian-American, Hispanic and foreign investors from cloud computing services. A federal judge granted the regulator's request for an asset freeze over entities operating as WCM and WCM777, which are based near Los Angeles and in Hong Kong and run by Ming Xu of Temple City, California.
A group of House Republicans introduced a bill that would prohibit the Obama administration from moving forward with its announced plans to relinquish oversight of the technical side of the Internet's Web address system. "America shouldn’t surrender its leadership on the world stage to a ‘multistakeholder model’ that’s controlled by foreign governments," Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of six cosponsors of the Domain Openness Through Continued Oversight Matters, or DOTCOM, Act.
Yahoo saw a significant drop in the number of government requests for data about its users in the second half of 2013, compared with the first half, according to the semiannual transparency report that the Internet company published. Google, on the other hand, saw a small increase in data requests over the same period.
A California federal judge has dismissed a proposed class action lawsuit against Facebook Inc that had accused the company of misappropriating the names and likenesses of minors who use the social network. At issue was Facebook's use of minors' names and photos in targeted advertising in a case that highlighted privacy concerns.
Chinese Internet company Baidu Inc. won the dismissal of a U.S. lawsuit by pro-democracy activists who complained that Baidu illegally suppressed political speech on China's most widely used Internet search engine. Eight New York writers and video producers had accused Baidu of creating search engine algorithms, at the behest of China, to block users in the United States from viewing articles, videos and other information advocating greater democracy in China.
A Minnesota teenager who initially got in trouble for a Facebook post, now has $70,000 from her school. In 2011, sixth grader Riley Stratton wrote on her Facebook page that she hated her teacher’s aide at a Minnewaska school.
Turkey blocked access to YouTube, escalating its efforts to ensure locals can’t watch videos that government officials would prefer they not see. Turkey made an “administrative decision” to block access to YouTube, presumably after Google lawyers declined to remove some users’ videos.
In a 100-page brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Aereo, which streams over-the-air television programming with antenna/DVR technology, reiterated that it is not violating copyright law and that major broadcasters should not be paid for the programming that it is facilitating. "Under the Copyright Act, petitioners have no right to royalties at all for retransmissions of their content within the original broadcast market," Aereo wrote in the brief.
The UK advertising watchdog has cleared a campaign by Microsoft attacking the privacy standards used by Google's Gmail email service. An ad campaign promoting Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft's rival email service, criticized for scanning the contents of users' emails for commercial purposes.
Microsoft has signed a patent-licensing agreement with yet another company making Android and Chrome OS devices. The latest to sign on the dotted line is Dell. But unlike many of the other Android and Chrome OS patent deals Microsoft has forged, the Microsoft-Dell relationship is a cross-patent licensing agreement.
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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.