Oracle Corp won a key legal victory against Google Inc as a U.S. appeals court decided Oracle could copyright parts of the Java programming language, which Google used to design its Android smartphone operating system. The case, decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, is being closely watched in Silicon Valley.
A U.S. appeals court on dismissed federal wiretap claims against Facebook Inc and Zynga Inc in a civil lawsuit over disclosure of user information to advertisers. In a separate ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also revived breach of contract claims under state law against Facebook over the information disclosures.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and AOL launched a new campaign to help protect consumers from deceptive online ads with a report detailing the dangers of online tech support scams. The Internet companies launched TrustInAds.org, a campaign designed to raise consumer awareness of emerging online advertising scams and allow companies to share information about deceptive ad trends.
The Federal Trade Commission said Snapchat had agreed to settle charges that the company was deceiving users about the ephemeral nature of the photos and video messages sent through its service. In marketing the service, Snapchat has said that its messages “disappear forever.” But in its complaint, the commission said the messages, often called snaps, can be saved in several ways.
Sites brimming with pirated movies and television shows are being supported, inadvertently, by major marketers that buy ad space on them. Thanks to the rise of automated ad-buying technologies, more ad dollars are flowing to sites with stolen copyrighted content than ever before, ad executives say.
A Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission called on the agency’s chairman to delay a proposal for new net neutrality rules, throwing into doubt whether the chairman will be able to muster enough votes at an FCC meeting next week to issue proposed rules. Jessica Rosenworcel, one of three Democrats on the five-member commission, said in a speech that a delay was warranted because of a “torrent of public response” to the idea that the commission’s rules might create a fast lane on the Internet for companies willing to pay for it.
An experimental feature in test versions of Google’s Chrome browser that is intended to provide greater protection against phishing can, in some cases, do the opposite, according to a security company. The “Origin Chip” feature shows the root domain of a website which in theory makes it easier for users to spot if they are going to “paypal.com” or “paypalripoff.com” without the distraction of the rest of the URL describing the exact location of the webpage.
Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online. Mr. Putin’s action, just weeks after he disparaged the Internet as “a special C.I.A. project,” borrowed a page from the restrictive Internet playbooks of many governments around the world that have been steadily smothering online freedoms they once tolerated.
Iran’s censor is reportedly banning WhatsApp, the popular messaging app Facebook bought for $19 billion three months ago, because Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, is a “Zionist.” The reason for the ban, according to Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, secretary of Iran’s Committee for Determining Criminal Web Content, “is the adoption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying. Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.
Rap Genius, a popular website that compiles annotations of song lyrics, has reached a licensing agreement with music publishers after being accused of using the lyrics of thousands of songs without permission. The agreement ends a standoff that began in November when the National Music Publishers Association, a trade group, singled out Rap Genius as the most “undesirable” on a list of sites that use lyrics without permission.
Moves, the fitness-tracking app recently acquired by Facebook, has changed its privacy policy to allow broader sharing of user data, including with Facebook. Previously, Moves’s privacy policy said the company did not “disclose an individual user’s data to third parties,” without a user’s consent, unless compelled by law enforcement.
Samsung Electronics Co. will challenge a jury’s $120 million award to Apple Inc. in a patent-infringement verdict that was “unsupported by evidence,” a lawyer for the Suwon, South Korea-based company said. Samsung will ask the trial judge and an appeals court, if necessary, to reduce the damages awarded by the jury May 2 and yesterday to zero, John Quinn, a lawyer for the maker of Galaxy smartphones, said in a statement.
The federal jury in the latest patent trial involving Apple and Samsung returned to court to recalculate some of the damages Samsung owed to Apple. After making the changes, the jury came to the same overall figure: $119.6 million. Apple’s lawyers had noted a potential discrepancy in the jurors’ damages total.
Nonprofit software maker Mozilla entered the fray in the continuing fight over net neutrality protections for the Internet, offering up a variation of an old proposal to re-regulate broadband lines under rules written for phone networks. Mozilla says that the FCC shouldn’t look at an Internet line only as a relationship between an Internet provider and a subscriber.
IBM announced a new security product that it says uses data mining and “behavioral analytics” to keep out hackers. IBM’s new security systems work by ingesting massive amounts of publicly available data from computer networks, software and websites, and establishing patterns of normal behavior.
Apple has hit a potential snag in its much-anticipated development of an Internet “smartwatch”, with Swatch objecting to trademark applications submitted by the U.S. company. The world’s biggest watchmaker said it had registered complaints against Apple’s applications for the trademark “iWatch”, claiming it is too similar to the Swiss company’s own “iSwatch” -- a wristwatch with a digital display.
In a nod to user privacy, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. said they will begin notifying users whose information has been requested by the government. The move pits the companies against federal law-enforcement officials, who said the disclosures could harm investigations, and adds to the growing divide between Silicon Valley and Washington.
In a company blog post titled, “Yahoo’s Default = a Personalized Experience,” Yahoo’s privacy team said that it would ignore “do not track” signals that users can activate in browsers to indicate that they don’t want their online behavior to be monitored. Web providers use such tracking to gather user data about their readers and to serve relevant ads and other information based on online activity.
A federal jury said that Apple and Samsung had infringed on each other’s patents in some mobile devices but awarded most of the damages to Apple, in the latest court fight between the two technology giants. The jurors found that at least some Samsung devices infringed on two of four patents at issue.
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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.