legal

There are many assured changes coming to the mobile world with the deal struck between Microsoft and Nokia today. But an uncertain future scenario with broad implications concerns how the combination of Nokia's very large patent portfolio and Microsoft's slew of licensing deals will alter the mobile patent landscape.

Over the last two years it's begun to seem as if all the major smartphone players are involved in one patent spat or another with Nokia a chief antagonist in the drama. The company has more than 10,000 patents and says it has reached licensing agreements with … Read more

Microsoft has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against the makers of TiVo and is seeking to bar the set-top DVR boxes from being imported to the U.S. as well as being sold within the country's borders.

The legal move, which was sniffed out by blog Winrumors, is a follow up to a year-old patent suit Microsoft filed against TiVo for illegally using video purchasing and delivery technology in its digital video recorders--two features Microsoft says are covered within patents it owns.

Microsoft had originally said it was "open to resolving this … Read more

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd petitioned a Delaware court Tuesday, Bloomberg reported, to intervene in an HP shareholders' lawsuit over his August ouster from the company.

It's the latest step in Hurd's ongoing attempt to keep a document sealed that reportedly contains former HP contractor Jodie Fisher's allegations of sexual harassment against him--the complaint that ultimately led to Hurd's departure. The plaintiff's side of the shareholder suit targeting HP has been seeking to make the eight-page document public.

Last week, a report surfaced that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Hurd's ouster … Read more

Quite a lot more details just came out about the insider-information probe that hit the tech world last month, and they're juicy.

The Wall Street Journal has a full report on the whole scheme. Turns out one of the men indicted today, Walter Shimoon, worked for Flextronics, a supplier to Apple. In the papers unsealed today, the FBI caught Shimoon on tape allegedly relaying super-secret details about the yet-to-be-released iPhone last year as well as the internal code name for the project that turned into the iPad. Fortune found the details in the 39-page indictment, and called them out … Read more

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange was granted bail today by a London judge, but prosecutors said they will appeal the decision.

In a media-mobbed hearing today, a U.K. judge decided to release Assange on bail of 200,000 pounds, or about $317,000, on the condition that he surrender his passport, wear an electronic tracker, provide a U.K. address, and report to police daily.

U.K. prosecutors, acting on behalf of the Swedish government, told the court that they will file a formal appeal within 48 hours. This follows some confusion about whether an appeal will take place, with … Read more

Previously sealed court documents leaked to gossip site Radar Online reveal that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who became famous through their portrayal in the film "The Social Network," are continuing their legal action against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and that Facebook unsurprisingly continues to denounce the claims.

To clarify: This isn't actually a new lawsuit, as a handful of media outlets reported yesterday following a report in the Daily Mail about the Winklevosses suing Facebook again. The U.K. outlet subsequently took down its story.

The partially redacted documents, which surfaced on Radar Online … Read more

After a New York Times magazine article exposed his bizarre business tactic of courting the worst customer feedback possible so that infuriated buyers would leave negative commentary online, boosting his Google search results, DecorMyEyes.com eyeglass proprietor Vitaly Borker has been arrested on charges of cyberstalking, making interstate threats, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

The original story about DecorMyEyes, published on November 26, detailed the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Borker's tactics of harassing, cheating, and bullying customers, sometimes under pseudonyms and often with threats of obscenity and violence, to the point that several of them contacted the police. He … Read more

Facebook lately has made controversial legal threats against a number of social-media sites, like Teachbook and Placebook, which it says are unlawfully capitalizing on the popularity of Facebook by using the suffix -book in their names.

But then there's Lamebook, a mischievous parody compendium of funny Facebook content that decided to sue Facebook, citing First Amendment protections, so that Facebook couldn't sue it first. TechCrunch writer Robin Wauters noticed overnight on Monday that Lamebook's Facebook fan page had been blocked, that outbound links to the site were severed, and that "like" buttons to its content … Read more

Some misguided souls in the Internet publishing world still consider all online material as being in the public domain. A recent example of this cluelessness is the editor of a food journal who stole an article that included a recipe for apple pie and then claimed to be doing the article's author a favor by reprinting it without the author's permission or any remuneration, as described by Helen A.S. Popkin on the MSNBC.com TechnoLog.

(See a related blog by CNET contributor Lance Whitney for more on the story.)

For the record, copyrights do indeed extend to … Read more