intellectual property

Mike Volpi's battle with his former employer Joost is now headed to court.

Joost announced on Friday that it has filed a lawsuit against Volpi, alleging that the former CEO used trade secrets and other confidential information in a bid to acquire a majority share in Skype from eBay.

The lawsuit comes just days after Joost relieved Volpi of his duties as chairman and a member of the board, saying that it was investigating his actions while he was chairman.

The fracas has its roots in the complicated relationship between online video provider Joost and VoIP provider Skype.

Joost … Read more

iStockphoto, a Getty Images subsidiary that licenses photos and other content for relatively low cost, is hoping to benefit by reassuring customers concerned about violating others' intellectual property rights.

Adding photographs can improve advertisements, brochures, and other content, but getting sued for inappropriately using another company's trademark or violating an individual's privacy is buzzkill. As a result, iStockphoto has now begun promoting a legal guarantee under which the company will cover up to $10,000 in legal expenses in cases involving trademark, copyright or other intellectual property rights, and privacy rights.

It's included with any file purchased … Read more

A federal appeals court on Friday affirmed a lower court ruling that Microsoft infringed on a patent owned by Alcatel-Lucent, but said the jury award of $358 million in damages was excessive.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., upheld a ruling that the patent at issue was valid and had been infringed on, but said there was not sufficient evidence to support the calculation of damages. The question of damages was sent back to the district court.

The patent, whose application was originally filed by engineers at AT&T, covers a … Read more

Google offered an olive branch to rivals of its digital book efforts at a congressional hearing Thursday, but Amazon was having none of it.

The move involves a major point of contention in Google's project to bring books to the Internet and in a proposed settlement of class-action suits that author and publisher groups brought against the project. Specifically, Google announced a reseller program that would let competitors get some measure of the rights--and revenue--that Google itself could get through the settlement.

"Any bookseller--Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Microsoft--would be able to sell the books covered by the settlement,&… Read more

Microsoft has at times alleged patent infringement in its attempts to stifle certain Linux-based applications. But one group is hoping to fight back by using Microsoft's own former patents.

The Open Invention Network (OIN), a group made up of Microsoft competitors and Linux advocates,said it's close an agreement to buy 22 patents that Microsoft sold to another organization earlier this year. According to Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the patents may relate to Linux.

The OIN believes that getting these patents is critical to protecting Linux developers from costly lawsuits, according to the Journal. The concern is … Read more

IBM scientists have imaged the chemical structure of an individual molecule, increasing the possibility for creating electronic building blocks on the atomic and molecular scale.

Scientists In Zurich, Switzerland, have, for the first time, imaged the "anatomy," or chemical structure, of an individual molecule with "unprecedented" resolution, using noncontact atomic force microscopy (AFM), IBM said Thursday. Resolving individual atoms within a molecule has been a long-standing goal of surface microscopy, according to the computer company, which has a research and development program dating back to 1945.

This research will be essential for building computing elements at the atomic scale that are vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices, IBM said.

The research is reported in the August 28 issue of Science magazine.

Though in recent years progress has been made in research of nanostructures on the atomic scale with AFM, imaging the chemical structure of an entire molecule has never been achieved with atomic resolution, according to IBM.

The atomic force microscopy was done in an ultrahigh vacuum and at very low temperatures (5 Kelvin equals minus 268 degrees Centigrade or minus 451 Fahrenheit) to image the chemical structure of individual pentacene molecules. Pentacene has a crystal structure that gives it properties as an organic semiconductor.

Scientists were able "to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time." This is roughly analogous to X-rays that pass through soft tissue to enable clear images of bones, IBM said.

The Science magazine article follows another piece published two months ago in the June 12 issue of the magazine covering the "determination of atomic charge states." The results discussed in both of these articles will "open new possibilities for investigating how charge propagates through molecules or molecular networks," IBM said.

Understanding the charge distribution may lead to building computing elements… Read more

Microsoft late Tuesday filed its formal appeal of a patent infringement ruling that threatens to halt sales of Word in its current form.

In May, a jury ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million for infringing on a patent held by Canada's I4i. Earlier this month, a federal judge increased that monetary award and also issued an injunction barring sales of Word that include the custom XML code found to infringe on I4i's patents.

"We believe the court erred in its interpretation and application of the law in this case and look forward to the September 23 hearing … Read more

SCO Group, whose 6-year-old legal case arguing Linux infringes its Unix copyright hasn't been enough to keep it from bankruptcy court, nevertheless won an important victory in its case Monday.

A skeptical federal judge earlier had ruled that Novell had retained Unix copyrights when it sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation, a company whose Unix assets SCO Group later acquired. But the appeals court overturned that decision, based in part on a close reading of the Unix asset purchase agreement, sending the matter to trial for a decision. The appeals court did uphold a ruling that … Read more

A federal appeals court has scheduled a hearing next month to decide whether to uphold a ruling that would force Microsoft to stop selling Word in its current form.

A district court judge last week issued an injunction that would halt sales of any version of Word that includes a custom XML function that was found by a jury to infringe on a patent from Canada's I4i. In May, that jury also dinged Microsoft with $200 million in damages, an amount that the judge hiked to more than $290 million at the same time he ordered the injunction, which … Read more