Category Archives: IP

Intellectual Property issues and news

Facebook Patents Developing: A Lawsuit From Mitel; More Patent Applications From AOL, Others

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The Mitel Networks suit, filed on March 16, 2012, in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, alleges infringement of two different patents, one for an “automatic web page generator” and another for “pro-active features for telephony.” They date from 1999 and 2007.

And two patent applications filed last week come from Compass Labs and AOL and respectively cover “user interest analysis and systems” and “content publication activity by a user.”

via Facebook Patents Developing: A Lawsuit From Mitel; More Patent Applications From AOL, Others | TechCrunch.

Most every site on the Internet, including this WordPress site, has its web pages generated automatically using a backend database.

Supreme Court saves medical profession from diagnostic patents

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The prospect of allowing patents on what amounts to human thought prompted a broad range of interest groups, including the ACLU, the Cato Institute (disclosure: I contributed to Cato’s brief in the case), and the American Medical Association, to file briefs urging the Supreme Court to invalidate the patent. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did so in a unanimous vote.

via Supreme Court saves medical profession from diagnostic patents.

Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court

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Two weeks ago the movie studios asked the court to issue a summary judgment against Hotfile and shut the site down. The MPAA argues that Hotfile is a piracy haven that should not be eligible for DMCA safe harbor protection.

This request didn’t go unnoticed by Google, who have now filed an amicus brief in support of the file-hosting site. According to Google, the movie studios are misleading the court by wrongfully suggesting that Hotfile is not protected by the DMCA.

via Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court | TorrentFreak.

Are Yahoo’s patents strong enough to topple Facebook?

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“What likely will happen in the short term is Facebook will make a decision as to whether it thinks this lawsuit is having a significant impact on its forthcoming IPO,” Patras said. “If it thinks it is having a significant impact then I suspect Facebook will come to a relatively quick license agreement with Yahoo to make this issue go away. If Facebook concludes it’s not having a significant impact they will fight on and get to the merits of these claims down the road.”

via Are Yahoo’s patents strong enough to topple Facebook?.

Open Invention Network

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Open Invention Network® is refining the intellectual property model so that important patents are openly shared in a collaborative environment. Patents owned by Open Invention Network® are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. This enables companies to make significant corporate and capital expenditure investments in Linux — helping to fuel economic growth.

via Open Invention Network.

Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities.

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But at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US).

via Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. » blog2.easydns.org – Happenings and observations.

Yahoo Stabs Facebook In The Back, Says Pay For Its Patents Or Get Sued

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Yahoo has long worked closely with Facebook, using the social network to power sign-up and login of its email service and Flickr. Just 11 days ago, Facebook congratulated Yahoo in a blog post noting its Open Graph protocol had helped Yahoo’s news reader app gain 25 million users, including 2 million each day, and more than 500,000 referrals a day. I doubt we’ll see such courtesies between these two anytime soon.

via Yahoo Stabs Facebook In The Back, Says Pay For Its Patents Or Get Sued | TechCrunch.

Takedowns run amok? The strange Secret Service/GoDaddy assault on JotForm

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The shutdown of his entire domain, without notice, for something a user had done even after protections were in place against it, seemed hugely unfair to Tank; he made his public case in terms that would also apply to other user-generated sites like YouTube. “We have 2 millions user generated forms,” he wrote. “It is not possible for us to manually review all forms. This can happen to any Web site that allows user-generated content.”

via Takedowns run amok? The strange Secret Service/GoDaddy assault on JotForm (updated).

Jotform.com is back up and it seems like an interesting idea.  Creating a form on that site is very easy but creating one locally in WordPress is easy too.  They seem to have a lot of users however.  It will also be interesting to see what happens with dns should the government abuse its authority (or lack thereof) in taking down sites capriciously and without due process.  The Internet was designed to route around damage.  Also this …

JotForm today moved its domains away from GoDaddy to registrars NameCheap and Hover. Tank still doesn’t know why his domain was suspended or when it might be returned; however, a WHOIS search this afternoon revealed that GoDaddy has at last removed the domain from its penalty box.

MegaBust’s MegaQuestions Cloud the Net’s Future

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It is however the viewpoint of this article that the Megaupload indictment will likely be seen in the long run as having a more significant impact on Internet business models and innovation than the withdrawal of PIPA and SOPA — and this would be the case even if those bills had been enacted in some combined form.

That is because those bills, problematic as they were, created new forms of civil copyright enforcement — blocking of infringing foreign websites by both search engines and ISPs, and termination of third party payment and ad services for both foreign and domestic infringing websites. Such remedies might of course curtail a website’s income and even lead to its demise, as well as to executive and worker unemployment and investor monetary losses. But they would not threaten executives and investors with involuntary, decades-long incarceration in Club Fed.

via MegaBust’s MegaQuestions Cloud the Net’s Future.

This opinion piece makes some important points but it’s clearly biased in favour of megaupload.