International Business Machines filed a lawsuit against daily deals website operator Groupon alleging infringement of its patents. The complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, accuses Groupon of building its business model using IBM's patents without authorization despite prior warnings.
Apple’s refusal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s request to help unlock a shooter’s iPhone has been a hot topic not only in its home country but in its biggest foreign market: China. Some Chinese have questioned whether the move is a marketing stunt, but others have supported Apple for standing up to the government -- something unimaginable for Chinese companies. Some also have asked: What if the Chinese government asked Apple to do the same thing? Could Apple say no?
A Brazilian judge ordered the release of Facebook's vice president for Latin America, a day after he was arrested for refusing to hand over WhatsApp messages to the police investigating a drugs case. The judge, Ruy Pinheiro, considered the detention of Diego Dzodan in Sao Paulo "unlawful coercion," the court in Sergipe state said in a statement.
Germany’s Federal Cartel Office is investigating whether Facebook Inc. abuses its dominance as a social network to harvest personal information, the latest in a series of challenges to the social network’s privacy policies. The probe builds on growing momentum in Europe to tie together questions of competition law and online privacy.
A webpage that masqueraded as a New York Times article and claimed that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had endorsed Bernie Sanders for president circulated widely on social media. The fake news article, which mimicked The Times’s typefaces and design and included the bylines of two of the newspaper’s political reporters, appeared with the headline “Warren Endorses Sanders, Breaking With Colleagues.”
The fight on encryption between Apple and the FBI moved to Capitol Hill for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, with each side showing no sign of compromise. Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, said that the FBI’s demand for the company to break into an iPhone that belonged to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attacks that left 14 people dead “would set a dangerous precedent for government intrusion on the privacy and safety of its citizens.” The FBI director, James B. Comey, emphasized the importance of law enforcement’s ability to get access to data for criminal investigations.
A Snapchat employee inadvertently spilled sensitive company information after falling for an email trick. An unidentified worker for the maker of the popular photo and video sharing app received an email asking for payroll information, Snapchat revealed in a blog post.
The Federal Communications Commission is probing whether big cable firms use special contract provisions to discourage media companies -- from Walt Disney Co. to smaller firms -- from running programming on the Internet. It is part of a broader attempt by the FCC to address one of the big conundrums of the telecom age: Why has television been so slow to come to the Internet, despite technical breakthroughs that made it possible long ago?
Facebook’s vice president for Latin America has been arrested on his way to work in São Paulo, Brazil. Federal police picked up Diego Dzodan because Facebook disobeyed a court order to help investigators in a drug case that involves a WhatsApp user.
Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, buckled to White House pressure in deciding to regulate broadband Internet service as a public utility in last year’s “net neutrality” rules, a new report from Republicans on a key Senate panel asserts. The report concludes the FCC’s actions were largely driven by a Nov. 10, 2014, public statement from President Barack Obama urging the agency to reclassify broadband as a common carrier and implement the strongest possible net neutrality rules -- the principle that Internet service providers treat all content equally.
A federal judge in New York ruled in favor of Apple, saying that an obscure colonial-era law did not authorize him to force the firm to lift data from an iPhone at the government’s request. The ruling is not binding in any other court, but it takes on an outsize importance as the U.S. government battles Apple in a separate case in California over whether the tech firm should help unlock a phone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December.
With a touch of a button on the wall outside Microsoft Corp.’s Cyber Defense Operations Center, opaque windows turn clear, offering visitors a glimpse of the high-tech bunker where the software giant’s security engineers work to thwart hackers. The new facility is at the heart of Microsoft’s campaign to rebuild its reputation for security at a time when the number of potential targets for cyberattacks -- from smartphones to corporate servers and Web services -- has exploded.
A German court has fined Facebook 100,000 euros ($109,000) for refusing to follow an order to adequately inform users about how it was using their intellectual property, a consumer group said. News of the ruling followed a visit by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he mounted a charm offensive in the face of increasing antipathy in Germany toward the world's biggest social media network prompted by fears for data protection.
China’s top Internet regulator closed the social media accounts of an influential, retired property developer who criticized President Xi Jinping’s campaign to tighten control over state-run media. Sites including Sina Corp.’s Weibo and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s QQ were told to shut down accounts held by Ren Zhiqiang for spreading “illegal information,” a spokesman for the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki tweeted out a message of thanks to the YouTube community at large, vowing that the company is "listening" to recent feedback from creators, who've taken issue with the site's complaint system. A growing number of popular YouTubers have criticized the company's way of handling copyright violations and, in turn, the appeals process about those notices.
A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in hundreds of Twitter posts. Al-Watan online daily said that religious police in charge of monitoring social networks found more than 600 tweets denying the existence of God, ridiculing Quranic verses, accusing all prophets of lies and saying their teachings fueled hostilities.
The United States has set out limits to its use of data collected in bulk about European citizens after a new information-sharing pact was agreed this month, according to documents seen by Reuters. A clear explanation of what information could be used for -- preventing its "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" use -- was a key condition of the new Privacy Shield framework that enables firms to easily transfer personal data to the United States.
The IRS announced that during a 9-month review of last year's cyber attack, it discovered that an additional 390,000 taxpayer accounts were potentially accessed during the breach. Those accounts are in addition to the confirmed access of and initial 114,000 last May and the subsequent 220,000 that were added in August. For those keeping track at home, today's announcement brings the total to over 700,000 affected taxpayers.
A U.S. appeals court overturned a $120 million jury verdict against Samsung, finally handing the South Korean smartphone maker a significant win in its longstanding patent feud with top rival Apple. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., said Samsung Electronics Co Ltd did not infringe Apple's "quick links" patent, and that two other patents covering the iPhone's slide-to-unlock and auto-correct features were invalid.
A December power outage in Ukraine affecting 225,000 customers was the result of a cyber attack, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said, marking the first time the U.S. government officially recognized the blackout as caused by a malicious hack. Security experts had already widely concluded that the downing of utilities in western Ukraine on December 23 was due to an attack, which is believed to be the first known successful cyber intrusion to knock a power grid offline.
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.