lawsuit

Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, and chipmaker Qualcomm announced on Wednesday that they had signed a licensing agreement settles all patent litigation between the two companies.

Financial terms of the agreement were not released, but the companies said Nokia will pay royalties to Qualcomm for 15 years to license technology that improves performance and battery life, while reducing the size of products. Nokia said it will also withdraw its antitrust complaint against Qualcomm filed with the European Commission.

"We believe that this agreement is positive for the industry, enabling the market to benefit from innovation … Read more

Unless Nintendo complies with a federal judge's order by Thursday, the company will be faced with a ban on several of its controllers, Bloomberg reports.

A judge for the U.S. Court in the Eastern District of Texas failed to overturn a verdict entered against the Japanese video game maker on July 18. The company had been previously ordered to pay $21 million to Anascape, a Texas company that holds a patent on motion-sensitive controllers.

After declining to order a new trial as Nintendo had requested, Judge Ron Clark instead is scheduled to issue a ban on the sale … Read more

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has spoken more than once this year about monetizing YouTube, but he showed some signs of patience on Thursday for finding a new, good way to sell ads on the video-sharing site. And when Google gets the mechanism right, Schmidt said he expects to hit the mother lode.

"There will be new monetization forms. That is what we are seeking. That is the holy grail," he said on a conference call after Google reported disappointing second-quarter earnings. "When we find it, it (monetization) is likely to be very large because of the scope … Read more

Computer maker Dell is now facing a class action lawsuit that alleges the company underpaid 5,000 call center employees.

A federal judge in the Oregon-filed case gave the lawsuit class-action status last week, according to an article in the Austin American Statesman. Any of the U.S. Dell call center employees who worked from February 8, 2004 to the present can now join the lawsuit to sue Dell as a group, according to the story.

The lawsuit was filed in February 2007 by two employees claiming they were not properly paid for overtime, training, or work preparation time, the … Read more

Microsoft's latest legal headache is a suit from a little-known company called Gotuit Media, which charges elements of Silverlight infringe on the video metadata company's patented technology.

In a suit filed July 2 in San Francisco Federal Court, Gotuit charges Silverlight infringes on several of its patents and seeks an injunction against the software maker as well as damages and attorney's fees.

Gotuit may be a relative unknown, but Microsoft is facing an opponent it knows quite well. Gotuit is represented by San Francisco-based lawyer Spencer Hosie, the same Hosie that successfully represented Burst.com in its … Read more

Update at 10:44 a.m. PDT: I added Google's "no comment." Update at 9:50 a.m. PDT: I added more details from the complaint.

AttorneyHal K. Levitte has sued Google over ads that cost $136.11 but that allegedly didn't yield any useful results.

The suit was first reported by InformationWeek.

Google placed 202,528 Levitte International ads shown in relation to parked domain pages--Internet addresses that have been registered but that have no Web pages--and 1,009 ads on error pages that can be shown when people type invalid URLs into their … Read more

What will it mean for YouTube if founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have, like many of us, entertained themselves by watching pirated videos found on their site?

Viacom will likely argue that YouTube is guilty of contributory copyright infringement if computer records show employees know unauthorized clips from shows, such as Hogan Knows Best or The Hills, are on the site and don't do anything to remove them.

According to legal experts, YouTube's response is likely to go something like this: "How are we supposed to know what's copyright material and what isn't?" … Read more

YouTube will be allowed to mask important user information from records it must turn over to Viacom, Google said in a blog post Monday.

"Viacom and the other litigants have backed off their demand for YouTube user viewing histories," Google said in a statement. "We have reached agreement to anonymize the data."

A Viacom spokesman declined to comment.

The move comes after a federal court earlier this month ordered Google's YouTube to hand over usernames, IP addresses, and viewing histories to Viacom, parent company of Comedy Central and MTV. This ignited a controversy over Internet … Read more

eBay cannot be forced to police its auction listings to identify counterfeit Tiffany & Co. products, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a lawsuit brought by the iconic 171-year-old jewelry company.

In what could become a landmark case for auction Web sites, the court said trademark law cannot be used to force eBay to shoulder the burden of examining individual auction listings for possible counterfeits.

"The court is not unsympathetic to Tiffany and other rights holders who have invested enormous resources in developing their brands, only to see them illicitly and efficiently exploited by others on the Internet,&… Read more