lawsuit

As we close the book on 2009 and ready for 2010, a legal settlement takes us back to 2007 and 2008, when Comcast got into trouble with customers and the feds for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

Comcast has agreed to pay $16 million to end to a class action lawsuit alleging the broadband provider promised and advertised certain download and upload speeds, but blocked peer-to-peer traffic on its high-speed Internet network.

"Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation," according to … Read more

Microsoft's apology Tuesday about a contractor copying blogging site software from a small company called Plurk might not be enough to take the lawyers off alert.

"We are still thinking of pursuing the full extent of our legal options available due the seriousness of the situation," Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon said in a statement posted Thursday. "Basically, Microsoft accepts responsibility, but they do not offer accountability."

Microsoft accepted responsibility for the copying, blaming it on a third-party company. It suspended access indefinitely to the site at MSN China, called Juku. "We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation," Microsoft said Tuesday. … Read more

The FTC wants Intel to grow up and start acting like a responsible company.

At least that's the goal behind the agency's lawsuit against the chipmaker. Filed on Wednesday, the FTC's suit charges Intel with a host of offenses, including using threats and rewards to convince PC makers not to buy chips from the competition, altering its compiler to weaken the performance of rival chips like those made by AMD, and preserving its CPU monopoly by stifling the market for GPUs (graphics processing units) made by Nvidia and other manufacturers.

On Wednesday, the FTC held a press … Read more

Facebook has sued three men, alleging they used phishing techniques to get access to Facebook user accounts and then sent spam from the compromised accounts.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in San Jose, California, and named as defendants Jeremi Fisher, Philip Porembski, Ryan Shimeall and the companies associated with them, Choko Systems, Harm, and iMedia Online Services, according to a Facebook statement late on Tuesday. The defendants could not be reached for comment.

The defendants are accused of launching at least four spam campaigns over the last couple of years, the latest in the last three months … Read more

Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center.

According to the complaint (PDF), the defendants sold products containing software application BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

The entire list of companies named in the suit is as follows: Best Buy; Samsung; Westinghouse; JVC; Western Digital; Robert Bosch; Phoebe Micro; Humax USA; Comtrend; Dobbs-Stanford; Versa Technology; Zyxel Communications; Astak; GCI Technologies.

Read more of "Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, 11 more named in GPL lawsuit&… Read more

In response to Nokia's own claims of copyright violation, Apple on Friday accused the largest handset maker in the world of copying some of the technology inside the iPhone.

In a suit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (PDF), Apple says Nokia is infringing 13 of its patents.

"Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours," Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel, said in a statement Friday.

Nokia issued this response: "We are aware that Apple has provided its response to Nokia Delaware … Read more

A lawsuit filed against Heartland Payment Systems over what is believed to be the biggest data breach in U.S. history has been dismissed.

The lawsuit was filed in January against Heartland by shareholders who alleged that Heartland failed to adequately safeguard the compromised consumer data and did not notify consumers about the breach in a timely manner as required by law.

The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey granted Heartland's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday, Heartland said in a statement on Wednesday. The court said the plaintiffs had not proved their allegations … Read more

An e-mail was sent on Thursday to Facebook users who were members at the time that its controversial, now-defunct Beacon advertising program was operated: it's the official notice about the proposed settlement for the class-action lawsuit against Beacon. The terms of the settlement have been public since September, but the court-ordered summary notice is the last step in the process before final approval on February 26.

"This is not a settlement in which class members file claims to receive compensation," the notice explained (possibly crushing the hopes of any Facebook members who might have got excited that … Read more

Verizon Wireless and AT&T have ended their public legal spat over advertising, and have thus agreed to stop complaining about each other's advertising campaigns.

On Wednesday AT&T announced it dropped its suit against Verizon Wireless for allegedly misleading customers by showing its weak 3G coverage. And Verizon said it agreed to drop a suit it filed earlier this year against AT&T for claiming it had the "More Bars in More Places," the "Best Coverage," and the "Best Worldwide Coverage."

In its amended suit filed in August, Verizon … Read more