Legal

Three people charged with the leaking of trade secrets, including information about Apple's iPad 2, were reportedly sentenced to jail time by a Chinese court this week.

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that Xiao Chengsong, Lin Kecheng, and Hou Pengna were found guilty by The Shenzhen Bao'an People's Court yesterday and sentenced to 18 months, 14 months, and 12 months in jail respectively. Out of the three, Kecheng is the only one to have been an employee with Foxconn at the time, according to the Journal.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Precision Industries, … Read more

Lodsys, a group that's targeted companies big and small for infringing on its patents, is now in the crosshairs of a company offering to pay a bounty for research that seeks to invalidate those patents.

Article One Partners, a business that crowdsources intellectual property (IP) research, has launched three new studies into patents held by Lodsys (1,2,3). Each offers a reward to the party that finds prior art, or examples of pre-existing technologies or other IP that could be used as evidence to invalidate one or more of Lodsys' patents.

Article One Partners became involved in a … Read more

Apple is seeking to put its legal weight behind developers targeted by Lodsys, a company that's taken aim at app makers on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android for infringing on patents it owns.

The iPhone maker yesterday filed a motion with the Eastern District of Texas to intervene as the defendant in a lawsuit from Lodsys that targets seven developers. Apple also used the filing to provide a counterclaim that both it and its developers have the license rights to use the technology. That filing was dug up by FOSS Patents.

"Apple has an interest … Read more

The same day Apple kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company staked its claim on domain names that include keywords of features in iCloud, iOS 5, and Mac OS X Lion.

Whois records dug up by TechCrunch show the company purchased at least 50 domain names. Some go directly to feature pages on Apple's Web site, while others dead end or show up as not yet being hosted.

Included are mentions of iTunes Match, Launchpad, Photo Stream, and Lion's resume feature. Some features even get their very own domain name, like iOS' airplaymirroring.com and conversationview.com. … Read more

The day Apple chose to out the name of its new cloud services platform, "iCloud," a trademark filing with the same name appeared in the European trademark office.

Spotted by Patently Apple this morning, Apple yesterday filed for the trademark rights to iCloud with the Trade Marks and Designs Registration Office of the European Union.

While there's no logo to go along with the filing, there are inklings as to Apple's plans in the trademark filing's list of the various classifications including one for "electronic storage of data, text, images, audio, and video; storage … Read more

In an interesting turn of events, Samsung's legal team has asked Apple to hand over next-generation versions of the iPhone and iPad to make sure its own future devices will not be subjected to the same infringement claims the company currently faces as part of Apple's lawsuit from last month.

The motion, filed on Friday with the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., and discovered by This Is My Next, asks the court to make Apple provide samples of the "final, commercial version(s)" of the iPhone and iPad, along with whatever retail packaging … Read more

Apple has sent notice to Lodsys, as well as developers targeted by the patent holdings firm, saying it has licensed the rights to in-app purchase, and that that license extends to developers on the iOS platform.

Developers MobileAge, the makers of the game Shanghai lite, received a letter from Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, Bruce Sewell, this morning telling them that the company has already licensed the four patents in Lodsys' portfolio, and that said license allows Apple's customers and business partners similar coverage to use it.

"Apple is undisputedly licensed to these (patents) and … Read more

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Apple out for not responding fast enough, or at all, to a developing legal situation that's got some iOS developers spooked.

In a post on the group's blog today, EFF staff attorney Julie Samuels said Apple has put developers in a difficult position by requiring them to use within their apps in-app purchase (IAP), a mechanism that's been targeted by a third-party group that says the technology infringes on its patents.

That group, Lodsys, triggered a controversy last week when it began going after developers--instead of Apple--in seeking a licensing … Read more

A patent application released this morning has provided clues to features Apple might add to iTunes and iOS to make entire music libraries take up less space on mobile devices with limited storage.

U.S. patent application No. 20110118858, which was unearthed by Apple Insider earlier today, details a system where segments of music clips from a user's library are stored locally on a device. When combined with an infrastructure that can fetch the rest of a song once it starts being played, this could provide users with a seamless music listening experience of their entire library, even without … Read more