Apple loses bid for U.S. ban on Samsung smartphone sales

A U.S. judge on Thursday rejected Apple’s request for a permanent sales ban in the United States against some older Samsung smartphones, a key setback for the iPhone maker in its global patent battle.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, ruled that Apple Inc had not presented enough evidence to show that its patented features were a significant enough driver of consumer demand to warrant an injunction

via Apple loses bid for U.S. ban on Samsung smartphone sales – chicagotribune.com.

A Patent on Seven Simple Lines of Code

Basically, you look in one person’s account to see if there is enough money to make a transfer, and if there is, you transfer the money. I’ll bet you’ve done that before.

In fact, here’s the whole program:

10 LET account1 = 200.00
20 LET account3 = 300.00
30 INPUT “Value to exchange for transaction”; exchange
40 IF account1 < exchange THEN PRINT “Inadequate value”: STOP
50 account1 = account1 – exchange
60 account3 = account3 + exchange
70 PRINT “Instruction to 1st institution: adjust 2nd account by ”; -exchange

This implementation demonstrates that Alice’s patented invention requires only seven simple lines of code, not complex programming or specially designed hardware.

via A Patent on Seven Simple Lines of Code – Public Knowledge.

Blogs from the Outercurve Foundation

Patent lawyers may be surprised to know that while today, most companies today use open source software, most of them struggle greatly with implementing the internal controls to coordinate their use of open source software with their patent portfolio management. This means it is quite possible that a company is seeking patent protection, or seeking to enforce patents, that read on open source software the company is using or developing — a combination of activities that would often not be considered economically rational.

via Blogs from the Outercurve Foundation – Open Source — The Last Patent Defense?.

The drafters of open source licenses intended to use the terms of those licenses to win a war against software patents, and whether they can do that remains to be seen, but in the meantime, don’t pass up the opportunity to use the principles of open source licensing to win your battles as well.

Patent assertion entities (patent trolls) typically do not make any kind of product for the above advise to be of any use.

Cisco moves to fend off Rockstar patent assault on its customers

Time Warner, Charter, and other cable companies are being sued by Rockstar for using Cisco equipment, like modems and cable boxes that run on standards such as DOCSIS.

“Cisco and Nortel were working and selling products in the same market for decades,” points out Cisco’s outside lawyer on the case, John Desmarais. “They never bothered each other, never sued each other, never threatened each other with infringement. If Nortel really thought those patents were infringed by Cisco, you think something would have been brought up.”

via Cisco moves to fend off Rockstar patent assault on its customers | Ars Technica.

Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users

The tl;dr version is that Adobe is going to start pushing for ebook vendors to provide support for the new DRM in March, and when July rolls Adobe is going to force the ebook vendors to stop supporting the older DRM. (Hadrien Gardeur, Paul Durrant, and Martyn Daniels concur on this interpretation.)

This means that any app or device which still uses the older Adobe DRM will be cut off.

via Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users – The Digital Reader.

Imgur Wiped Out By Sky Broadband Torrent Site Blocking

Sky regularly pull IP addresses listed on our DNS servers and adds them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IP addresses to a webserver that the ISP owns which returns a blocked page message,” YIFY explains.

Therefore, when YIFY began using CloudFlare servers in Australia, Sky pulled these IP addresses and blocked them in the mistaken belief that they were YIFY’s. Since Imgur uses the same IP addresses, Sky’s automated blocking took the site offline, to the huge disappointment of countless customers.

via Imgur Wiped Out By Sky Broadband Torrent Site Blocking | TorrentFreak.

Chris Messina Talks About Inventing The Hashtag On Twitter

On Quora, Messina explained why he chose to let the hashtag become a free device anyone can use and not a licensable product that he could have made money from:

  1. claiming a government-granted monopoly on the use of hashtags would have likely inhibited their adoption, which was the antithesis of what I was hoping for, which was broad-based adoption and support — across networks and mediums.
  2. I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea.

via Chris Messina Talks About Inventing The Hashtag On Twitter – Business Insider.

Newegg hurtles toward Texas showdown with famed “patent troll”

But Jones didn’t invent SSL; nor did he invent RC4, an algorithm invented in 1987, two years before the filing date of the Jones patent.

Whatever his invention is, it came before the World Wide Web, which was made available to everyone in 1993. Jones filed for his patent in 1989, and it uses some distinctively pre-Web vocabulary; describing encryption via modems and phone lines.

via Newegg hurtles toward Texas showdown with famed “patent troll” | Ars Technica.

By claiming such common encryption, the TQP patent is essentially a “we-own-the-Internet” patent.  Spangenberg declined to speak to Ars for this story, but in an August interview he said the TQP licensing campaign has reaped around $40 million in revenue.

Canonical shouldn’t abuse trademark law to silence critics of its privacy decisions

To keep the balance between the integrity of our trademarks and the ability to to use and promote Ubuntu, we’ve tried to define a reasonable Intellectual Property Policy. You can read the full policy at http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-policy. As you can see from our policy, to use the Ubuntu trademarks and and Ubuntu word in a domain name would require approval from Canonical.

via Canonical shouldn’t abuse trademark law to silence critics of its privacy decisions | micah.f.lee.

Update:  From Canonical Blog.

In the case of fixubuntu.com, we were concerned that the use of the trademark implied a connection with and endorsement from the Ubuntu project which didn’t exist. The site owner has already agreed to remove the Ubuntu logo and clarified that there is no connection; from our perspective the situation has been resolved, and we have no issue with the site or the criticism it includes.  In fact, far from an trying to silence critics, our trademark policy actually calls out parody and criticism and other uses as being allowed when the marks are used appropriately.  (Please make the parodies funny – we need a good laugh as much as anyone!)

From Mark Shuttleworth:

This was a bit silly on our part, sorry. Our trademark guidelines specifically allow satire and critique (‘sucks sites’) and we should at most have asked him to state that his use of the logo was subject to those guidelines.

Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android. The smartphone patent wars have been underway for a few years now, and the eight lawsuits filed in federal court today by Rockstar Consortium mean that the conflict just hit DEFCON 1.

Google probably knew this was coming. When it lost out in the Nortel auction, the company’s top lawyer, David Drummond, complained that the Microsoft-Apple patent alliance was part of a “hostile, organized campaign against Android.” Google’s failure to get patents in the Nortel auction was seen as one of the driving factors in its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola in 2011.

via Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google | Ars Technica.