Category Archives: IP

Intellectual Property issues and news

Growing anger over Dotcom fiasco

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If provincial newspaper editorials are anything to go by, there is growing anger about the authorities’ handling of Kim Dotcom. The Waikato Times’ editorial entitled, NZ: 51st state of the US, is particularly worth reading. It says that the announcement of the illegal spying has ‘heightened suspicions that this country’s relationship with the United States has become one of servility rather than friendship’. The editorial’s conclusion is worth quoting at length: ‘Dotcom is wanted in the US to face nothing more threatening than breaches of copyright laws.

via Bryce Edwards: Political round-up: Growing anger over Dotcom fiasco – Politics – NZ Herald News.

She says ‘If the authorities are so supine in their relationship with their US counterparts and so eager to corral an alleged copyright criminal – allegations which Dotcom is strongly contesting – that they don’t check the basics before mounting their interception, what guarantees do other businesses have that this is a one-off affair?’

Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay!

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Rackspace has been subjected to yet another patent lawsuit by a patent troll looking for a settlement. In this case, the plaintiff is called PersonalWeb Technologies. This particular lawsuit is not much different than the others, except that it highlights why software patent litigation suppresses innovation, and why Congress and the courts need to improve the system. If it wasn’t such a serious issue we might want to laugh at the irony of it all.

via The Official Rackspace Blog – Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay!.

In fact, GitHub is a perfect example of a company that is built to foster and enhance innovation. The GitHub repository service for software development projects has achieved legendary status among open source developers all over the world. GitHub has over 2.1 million users hosting over 3.7 million repositories. They are a paragon of innovation. Yet PersonalWeb has the audacity to file a lawsuit which alleges that “Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub Code Hosting Service” infringe some obscure patent from 1999 that has nothing to do with Rackspace and GitHub. Who is truly innovating here, PersonalWeb or Rackspace and GitHub?

Here‘s a list of their patents.  My favorite:

8,099,420 Accessing Data In A Data Processing System

The software patent solution has been right here all along

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Lemley’s thesis is radically simple: “Most software patents today are written in functional terms,” he writes. “If courts would faithfully apply the 1952 Act, limiting those claims to the actual algorithms the patentees disclosed and their equivalents, they could prevent overclaiming by software patentees and solve much of the patent thicket problem that besets software innovation.”

via The software patent solution has been right here all along | Open Source Software – InfoWorld.

University of California Sues Facebook And Others Over Patents

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The Regents of the University of California and its lawsuit-happy patent licensee Eolas Technologies yesterday filed lawsuits against Facebook, Disney and Wal-Mart over four interactive technology patents they believe the companies are infringing.

via University of California Sues Facebook And Others Over Patents.

However, two of the patents cited in the new lawsuits were declared invalid in February 2012 by a Texas jury in a separate lawsuit, which targeted Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo and others.

At the time, Wired headlines its report on the invalidation thusly: “Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll’s Claim to Own the Interactive Web”.

Samsung expected to sue Apple over iPhone 5 tomorrow

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The courtroom battle between Apple and Samsung seems to be far from over, and come tomorrow Apple is in for a major headache as soon as it makes the iPhone 5 official. That’s because Samsung is poised to sue the company over patents it owns relating to the LTE connectivity the new smartphone is expected to use.

via Samsung expected to sue Apple over iPhone 5 tomorrow – Cell Phones & Mobile Device Technology News & Updates | Geek.com.

Facing Samsung in court again may not phase Apple even though the shoe will firmly be on the other foot this time. However, there’s two other companies set to try and block sales of the new iPhone. The first is the company behind the GooPhone i5, which successfully managed to patent the design of its phone in China that just happens to look like the leaked shots we have seen of the iPhone 5. If the two phones do indeed look the same, expect a lawsuit.

YouTube Flags Democrats’ Convention Video on Copyright Grounds

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On Wednesday morning, a campaign spokesman confirmed there was a “technical error on YouTube that inadvertently triggered a copyright message at the end of the live stream Tuesday night,” adding “We do not expect tonight’s coverage will be affected.”

After this story was published, the video was subsequently marked “private.”

via YouTube Flags Democrats’ Convention Video on Copyright Grounds | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Groupon Sued With LivingSocial Over Mobile Ad Patent

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XcellaSave Inc. is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages from Chicago-based Groupon and Washington-based LivingSocial, according to two lawsuits filed yesterday in federal court in Delaware.

via Groupon Sued With LivingSocial Over Mobile Ad Patent – Bloomberg.

As if Groupon doesn’t have enough problems.

Update: I missed this on August 1 from Techcrunch.

Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder

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Jurors who zipped through more than 600 questions in three days to arrive at their verdict in the intellectual-property battle between Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) had as their leader an engineer with a patent to his name.

via Apple-Samsung Jury May Have Leaned on Engineer, Patent Holder – Bloomberg.

A nice summation of lots of links from all around the blogoshere can be found on Groklaw here.  Here’s a small tidbit from that summation:

Professor Michael Risch points out an even worse inconsistency:

How did the Galaxy Tab escape design patent infringement? This was the only device to be preliminarily enjoined (on appeal no less), and yet it was the one of the few devices to be spared the sledgehammer. And, by the way, it looks an awful lot like an iPad. Yet the Epic 4G, a phone I own (uh oh, Apple’s coming after me) — which has a slide out keyboard, a curved top and bottom, 4 buttons on the bottom, the word Samsung printed across the top, buttons in different places (and I know this because I look in all the wrong places on my wife’s iTouch), a differently shaped speaker, a differently placed camera, etc. — that device infringes the iPhone design patents….

Relatedly, the ability to get a design patent on a user interface implies that design patent law is broken. This, to me, is the Supreme Court issue in this case. We can dicker about the “facts” of point 2, but whether you can stop all people from having square icons in rows of 4 with a dock is something that I thought we settled in Lotus v. Borland 15 years ago. I commend Apple for finding a way around basic UI law, but this type of ruling cannot stand.