lawsuit

Feds want Net snooping limits overturned

The Bush administration plans to fight a recent court decision that threatens to curb its powers to obtain logs of Americans' Internet activities without court approval.

As expected, the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday filed a notice that it plans to appeal a September federal court ruling that declared the surveillance tactic, known as a national security letter, to be unconstitutional. The government's filing was one paragraph long and came with no additional comment, according to the Associated Press.

The power to use national security letters has been around for a few decades, but it was effectively … Read more

Acer sues HP again over patents

Two of the world's largest PC makers still can't seem to get along.

Acer is suing Hewlett-Packard again for patent violations. It's an escalation of the battle over the two companies' intellectual property that began earlier this year.

Filed in a U.S. District Court in Wisconsin and with the U.S. Internaional Trade Commission Tuesday, Acer said it is countersuing HP for infringing on its patents related to servers, PCs, and peripheral devices. HP declined to comment on Acer's suit.

HP initiated the fight in March when it sued Acer over five patents involving read/… Read more

BusyBox settles Monsoon GPL lawsuit

Programmers behind the BusyBox collection of open-source utilities have settled a September lawsuit that contended Monsoon Multimedia's use of the software violated the General Public License (GPL).

Under the terms of the settlement, Monsoon may ship its Hava digital TV products using the BusyBox software without objection from BusyBox, according to a joint announcement Tuesday from Monsoon and the Software Freedom Law Center, which represents BusyBox.

In addition, Monsoon has agreed to appoint an open-source compliance officer to monitor the issue, to publish on its Web site the source code for the version of BusyBox it uses, to undertake &… Read more

Sun countersuit: NetApp violates 12 patents

A month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun Microsystems, alleging the server and software company's ZFS file system infringes seven NetApp patents. Sun on Thursday fired back with a suit that claims NetApp violates 12 of Sun's.

Sun's suit also argues that NetApp's patents are invalid and that it doesn't infringe them anyway. And it requests an injunction prohibiting the company from selling any products that infringe Sun's patents.

Patent suits are often expensive and acrimonious proceedings, and they're particularly unpleasant when fought among Silicon Valley rivals who often share mutual customers and sometimes … Read more

NetApp founder brushes off Sun threat

A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning.

"This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes this suit to reach court--NetApp will be doing just fine," Hitz said in a blog posting … Read more

Episode 590: What's your brain's bandwidth?

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Sun plans to countersue NetApp

Updated at 2:31 p.m. PDT: Sun Microsystems plans to countersue Network Appliance later this week, Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday, a suit that will include a request to remove the company's products from the market.

Schwartz said on his blog that he has "no interest whatever in suing them" and therefore "reached out" to Chief Executive Dan Warmenhoven. But, he said, NetApp's demands--that Sun "retract" its ZFS file system from open-source community and restrict its use to computing and not storage devices--can't be met.

Consequently, "Later this … Read more

Comcast to face lawsuits over BitTorrent filtering

The blogosphere is abuzz over an Associated Press investigative article this past Friday on the subject of Comcast's BitTorrent filtering. Briefly, there were a number of articles in early September which alleged that Comcast was using some fairly sneaky techniques to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast, of course, denied any such behavior. It took a month and a half, but both a mainstream media news organization as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have tested and confirmed the previously reported claims. It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes … Read more

IP Innovation: 'We are equal opportunity patent trolls'

Acacia/IP Innovation has gone on the record as saying that it's not trying to kill open source: it just wants to suck anyone and everyone dry of cash, regardless of license. I don't know about you, but I feel strangely comforted. :-)

Acacia says:

IP Innovation is not attempting to inject itself in the ongoing philosophical debate of whether products or services which utilize open source are subject to the same intellectual property laws/behaviors as non-open source offerings. Acacia and its subsidiaries do not philosophically differentiate any company, but rather seek to consistently and fairly monetize … Read more