Legal Issues

The European Union's new complaint against Microsoft really takes one back. Like, a decade or so.

Its objection--that bundling a browser into the operating system violates antitrust law--is the same one that U.S. regulators raised in 1996.

The newest allegations stem from a 2007 complaint by Norway's Opera that Microsoft was hurting competition by including Internet Explorer in Windows and by not better adhering to Web standards.

What is most odd about the EU taking up the issue is its timing. The EU spent years going after … Read more

Parents trying to figure out what video games are appropriate for their kids have a new tool at their disposal.

Already, they've been able to look at games' ratings--"E" for everyone, "T" for teen, "M" for ages 17 and up, and "AO" for adults only. But now, the agency that decides which games are right for which age groups, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, will be offering what it calls "summaries" of each game's rating.

The idea, the ESRB said in a release Wednesday morning, is to … Read more

Executives throughout the video game industry may be breathing a big sigh of relief. That's because it looks like one of the industry's biggest critics, Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, has had his voice cut off at the knees, to mix a metaphor or two.

According to a Thursday report on the popular video game blog Kotaku, Thompson has been disbarred by a Florida judge who ruled he has been guilty of some seriously unbecoming conduct.

Essentially, according to Kotaku, the court ruled that Thompson "made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order...communicated the subject of representation directly with clients of opposing counsel...engaged in prohibited ex parte communications...publicized and sent hundreds of pages of vitriolic and disparaging missives, letters, faxes and press releases to the affected individuals...targeted an individual who was not involved with (Thompson) in any way, merely due to 'the position (the individual) holds in state and national politics'...falsely, recklessly and publicly accused a judge of being amenable to the 'fixing' of cases," and so on.

Thompson might best be known for his withering attacks of Rockstar Games for the sexual content that was hidden in its hit game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But he has also been vocal in his criticism of countless other games for what he saw as too much violence and sexual content. … Read more

Electronic Arts may have attempted to appease angry customers by amending its digital rights management policy on Spore, but the company's DRM troubles aren't over yet.

Earlier this week, a class action suit was filed in the Northern District of California Court on behalf of Melissa Thomas and all other Spore purchasers. The suit contends that EA violated the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law by failing to inform consumers that by installing Spore, they also inadvertently install a program called SecuROM. SecuROM is a copy protection program that limits the number of times software … Read more

Clarification: Story updated at 6:57 p.m. to clarify the difference between the Spore and iTunes models.

After years of anticipation, the coming-out party for Electronic Arts' new evolution game Spore seems to be getting rained out.

Spore was one of the most highly anticipated games in recent years, in part because it's the brainchild of Will Wright who, with The Sims, turned simple tasks like taking virtual trips to the bathroom into the best-selling PC game ever. Fans and EA alike had high hopes for Spore, a similarly quirky game that's based on evolutionary biology and … Read more

This post was updated at 1:50 p.m. PDT to correct the spelling of Tory Belleci's name.

MythBusters co-host Adam Savage is stepping back from public comments suggesting that legal counsel from several credit card companies led the Discovery Channel to pull the plug on an episode dedicated to security holes in RFID.

At the Last HOPE conference in New York in July, Savage told a crowd of several thousand people that his theory on why MythBusters had not gone forward with a planned episode on RFID (radio frequency identification) hackability was that on a conference call to … Read more

It looks like wiser heads--or at least those who could be made to recognize a great PR opportunity--have prevailed at AMC.

If you're one of the many hooked fans of the cable channel's hit show, Mad Men, which chronicles the goings-on at a fictional 1960s New York ad agency, and you're also a Twitter user, you might have found yourself eagerly following tweets from folks like Don Draper, Roger Sterling, or Peggy Olson.

And getting people to follow the show's characters probably seemed like a clever way of using Twitter for marketing.

Except that AMC had … Read more

SEATTLE--Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn't be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy--as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That's why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world's first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn't require a corporate intermediary.

The team is also developing a version of its software for iPhones, though it isn't ready for public use yet.

To Kohno, the danger associated with commercial laptop-tracking services is that it's never possible to know for sure that someone at a company that makes such software wouldn't exploit the company's possession of your personal information--and access to what's on your laptop--for personal gain. Or, he said, that information could be subpoenaed in court cases. … Read more

Spore isn't the only thing on Electronic Arts' mind. The company still wants Take-Two Interactive.

On Monday, CEO John Riccitiello sent an open letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick saying that EA's existing offer to acquire the smaller game manufacturer for $25.74 per share would officially expire just before midnight Eastern time on Monday. It sounds like EA is simply losing patience.

"Given the passage of time, we have to validate the assumptions used in the model to support our offer price of $25.74 per share in cash," Riccitiello's letter read. "In … Read more