lawsuits

The Boston Globe is reporting that LANCOR, the Nigerian-owned company that has filed suit against the One Laptop Per Child project for patent infringement, is actually helmed by a man convicted of bank fraud. He spent a year in prison. Apparently not much has changed:

OLPC also has been hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit in Nigeria filed by Lagos Analysis Corp. of Natick. The suit claims the foundation stole the company's keyboard design. Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed.

The founder … Read more

3:14 p.m. PT: This post has been updated with the results of the hearing involving Facebook and 02138 Magazine.

There's a cliched old joke among the Ivy League set: how many Harvard students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? The answer: only one. He holds that bulb and the world revolves around him.

It's a somewhat fitting jab in the latest back-and-forth spat involving social-networking site Facebook's powerful legal team, as the skirmish has brought out the ugly sides of both the Palo Alto, Calif.-based dot-com and the Harvard alumni magazine attempting … Read more

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but try telling that to The Romantics.

The new-wave rock band has filed a lawsuit against Guitar Hero game publisher Activision for its use of a sound-alike recording of What I Like About You in Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press. The band is also seeking an injunction against the game, which could result in the game being pulled from store shelves.

The band isn't claiming Activision infringed on its copyright of the song; indeed the game publisher had permission to use … Read more

I really like the song "Californication," but it's not an enforceable trademark for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, no matter what this lawsuit against Showtime says:

The lawsuit alleges unfair competition, dilution of the value of the name and unjust enrichment, claiming the title is "inherently distinctive, famous ... and immediately associated in the mind of the consumer" with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

"Californication is the signature CD, video and song of the band's career, and for some TV show to come along and steal our identity is not right," the band's lead singer, Anthony Kiedis, said in a statement.

I think people up in Oregon, for one, might beg to differ.… Read more

Northeastern University has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, claiming the database architecture that Google uses to feed up search results has been misappropriated, according to The Boston Globe.

The lawsuit claims the technology was developed and patented by a company called Jarg in Waltham, Mass., that was co-founded by Northeastern professor Kenneth Baclawski. The patent, owned by the university and licensed to Baclawski, covers a method for sectioning database queries into different portions that are each processed by a different computer.

The lawsuit was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of … Read more

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

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

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

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