intellectual property

The patent infringement lawsuit filed by WiLAN against Intel, HP, and other heavy hitters in the tech industry has entered a new stage.

Yesterday, Judge T. John Ward of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a 55-page order that defines the terms used in a patent claim when those meanings are disputed by the parties.

In this case, the order (PDF) may have given WiLAN an edge because the company announced that it is pleased with the decision and said it believes it can now demonstrate that many of the defendants' Bluetooth, WiMax, and … Read more

Microsoft's top lawyer said on Monday that the company is taking action in the wake of a report that its antipiracy efforts have been used by the Russian government as a means to monitor computers of dissident groups in that country.

In a blog post, general counsel Brad Smith said that the company is hiring an outside law firm to investigate a report in The New York Times that the Russian government has used Microsoft's antipiracy efforts as a pretext to search computers of potential dissidents and, separately, that some lawyers hired by Microsoft have worked with corrupt … Read more

Updated 12:09 p.m. PDT with additional information and background and at 12:42 p.m. PDT with comment from the plaintiffs.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen fired a patent shot across the bow of several prominent technology companies Friday, suing Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others over patent claims.

Allen's firm Interval Licensing filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the above companies, as well as AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples, are violating patents he received for several Internet technologies while leading Interval Research, now out of business. The case was filed in U.… Read more

Facebook is concerned that a start-up social network with the word "book" in its portmanteau title is infringing on its own trademarks. It filed a court complaint on Wednesday in a California district court against Teachbook, a networking site geared toward teachers.

Claiming that Teachbook is "riding on the coattails of the fame and enormous goodwill of the Facebook trademark," the complaint asserts that the start-up, which is headquartered in a suburb of Chicago, shouldn't be using the "-book" suffix.

"The 'book' component of the Facebook mark has no descriptive meaning and … Read more

ASPEN, Colo.--The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it "isn't working" for content creators any longer.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers' unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.

"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It'… Read more

Net neutrality regulations could, if the music industry gets its way, usher in more Internet surveillance and a crackdown on suspected pirates.

This week, just about every music trade group called for broadband policies--which could include a new federal law--that would "encourage" Internet providers to crack down on suspected piracy by their customers.

"The current legal and regulatory regime is not working for America's creators," the groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said Wednesday in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "Our businesses are being undermined, as are the dreams … Read more

Are conservatives gaming Digg? Probably, but there are two sides to any story.

A report by liberal news organization AlterNet claimed on Thursday that conservatives are "burying" stories on the news aggregator. "A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives."

Conservatives--in this case, "Digg Patriots"--"cheat" by voting down Digg submissions with a liberal bent, AlterNet claims. "This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction."

I'm not going to argue with the basics of the report because this sort of thing goes on with both conservative and liberal groups. (AlterNet could have easily expanded the scope of "certain groups" to include liberals but chose not to.) I am going to take issue, however, with its tenor and balance, as it was implied by some blogs that the AlterNet findings were coming from a neutral source.

Specifically, when AlterNet inserts a paragraph listing all of the things Digg Patriots allegedly hate, then claims generally in the last sentence that Digg Patriots "just love to hate," Alternet forfeits any claim to balance--and possibly veracity.

I visit Digg's front door often, and what I usually find is hardly proof that conservative groups are succeeding in any way. Here's a very unscientific sampling of what I've found as some of the most-dugg (top 10) submissions as I randomly visited the Digg front door during the last few days. "Fox News is shockingly old" and "Conservapedia:E=mc2 Is A Liberal Conspiracy and "Liberals Start F*** Tea Party Campaign." (I've omitted the last ink because the original headline uses three letters of a four-letter expletive.)

A September 2008 report from PBS titled "Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias" says:… Read more

Sun executives were hardly happy when Google revealed how Android would make use of some Java technology without paying Sun any license fees. But it took Oracle's cold calculation and financial strength to turn that dissatisfaction into a lawsuit.

On Thursday, Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement concerning use of Java in Android, setting the stage for an expensive, potentially protracted clash of titans. "In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly, and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property," the company said in a statement.

Although Android's success is new, its software components aren't. … Read more

A Los Angeles journalist who was accused of leaking confidential court documents from his lawsuit against YouTube has abandoned his suit and has agreed to pay $20,000 to the video-sharing site.

Bob Tur, the chopper-piloting broadcast journalist whose company filed a 2006 lawsuit alleging copyright violations, agreed to drop out of the current suit and not file the same one again later. In return, YouTube agreed not to pursue its request for a federal court to levy fines on Tur's attorneys at the law firm of Proskauer Rose or other sanctions.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, previously … Read more