legal

'Tetris'-like iPhone app to be pulled

A young software developer has decided to pull his iPhone game from Apple's App Store because it was too similar to the classic arcade game Tetris.

Noah Witherspoon, a college student in Atlanta, created a free game called Tris for Apple's handset platform. But Apple recently contacted Witherspoon to let him know that the Tetris Company, which licenses the eponymous video game, had notified it about copyright and trademark infringement claims against the app.

Witherspoon wrote on his blog that he has chosen not to take the matter to court and will pull the game on Wednesday. "… Read more

Another nail in the 'Scrabulous' coffin

There's no more Scrabulous on Facebook. For real. Unless you're in India.

According to the Associated Press, the social network has officially disabled access to the popular online game, which closely resembles classic board game Scrabble, after receiving a complaint from Mattel, the company that publishes it outside the United States and Canada. Access within the U.S. and Canada had already been blocked.

The rights to Scrabble are owned by different companies: Hasbro handles the game in North America, and Mattel internationally. The two takedowns were different: The creators of Scrabulous disabled U.S. and Canadian access on their own, … Read more

Your matchmaker for class action lawsuits: SueEasy

SueEasy.com is a matchmaking app that connects people who have major and minor grievances in life with attorneys eager to file class action lawsuits for them. Like any good Web app, SueEasy is free, simple, and perhaps even effective.

Let's say your Web hosting company leaves you twisting in the wind, or you come back from a trip and your cell phone bill is more than your mortgage payment. In the olden days, if you were sufficiently harmed and angry, and had the fortitude of a sumo wrestler, maybe you could find an attorney who would spend months, … Read more

Facebook developers to factor in age, location

Facebook has announced modifications to its developer application programming interface so that the creators of third-party applications can restrict their reach by demographic--more specifically, by age or location.

The update is designed to help developers who may run into legal issues if they make their applications available to all Facebook users, regardless of how old they are or what countries they live in.

This could apply, for example, to promotional applications created by liquor companies that need to restrict access to those over 21 in the United States, or to game makers that have only been licensed in certain countries. … Read more

Report: Fees may sink Pandora soon

Tim Westergren, the founder of popular Web radio start-up Pandora, has said in an interview with The Washington Post that his company may be close to a shutdown.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," Westergren said in the article, published Saturday. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The problem, he explained, is last year's royalty hike for Web radio, which makes it extremely expensive for an independent start-up to stay afloat in the business. The royalty increase will eat up 70 percent of Pandora's $25 million in revenue, Westergren said.… Read more

Class action suit means Facebook's Beacon just won't go away

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had … Read more

Federal court hands open-source licenses a significant victory

Yesterday, a US federal court of appeals handed open source a significant victory. An earlier district court ruling in Jacobsen v. Katzer had put open-source licensing on shaky ground by treating the Artistic License as a contract, with some injurious readings on likely remedies under an open-source license.

As Mark Radcliffe details, the Jacobsen ruling [PDF] is a boon to all open-source licensing, and not merely those that choose to use the Artistic License:

The CAFC reversed the District Court's decision and its reasoning is very helpful for the open source community. The court found that the limitations in … Read more

Winklevoss twins advance to Olympic finals

There's been another victory on the water for ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss--even as their court case against Facebook continues to peter out unfavorably.

The identical twins, representing the United States in the men's pair (M2-) event of the Olympic rowing races in Beijing, placed second in their Wednesday semifinal to advance to the grand final.

At the 500-meter mark, a quarter of the way through the race, the Winklevosses were in fifth place out of the six boats. But they powered through crews from Germany, Serbia, and Italy to cross the finish line just less than … Read more

ConnectU-Facebook fight one stroke closer to finish line

As twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss power toward Wednesday's semifinal in the rowing events of the Olympics in Beijing, their longstanding court case against Facebook is winding down.

A San Jose, Calif., judge ruled late last week that ConnectU, the start-up that the brothers founded with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, must transfer its stock to Facebook as part of the settlement acquisition by Tuesday, despite the claims on behalf of ConnectU that Facebook failed to disclose its true valuation when negotiating the terms of the settlement. The start-up's founders alleged fraud on Facebook's part, and claimed that … Read more