Displaying items by tag: Legal

Good news just can’t stop coming from Samsung. The Korean giant once again reported on successful sales of the Galaxy Note II. Although this smartphone started selling in October, Samsung cited at the beginning of this month that 3 million units have sold. Now they have taken a step further and achieved another milestone.

Yet another busy day at Apple, as they acquire another patent on something pretty ridiculous. Animation flipping pages in applications is now owned by Apple. The U.S. Patent Office granted Apple a patent for this animation.

Even before the arrival to the market it was known that a big part of the internal flash memory of Surface is reserved for Windows alone and applications that come preloaded on the device. Thus, a 32-gigabyte version has only about 16 GB of free space for user data. That was reason enough for California Attorney General Andrew Sokolowski to sue Microsoft. In fact, he bought the Surface (RT) with 32 gigabytes of internal memory, but the internal memory got filled very fast with music and documents and then he realized that he actually has only half the space than he thought it should have.

Blizzard has found themselves the target of some of their users who decided to press charges as a group against the company. The players accuse the company that it did not properly secure personal information and is now forcing them to buy Battle.net authenticators to have at least some minimal protection. Such physical authenticators costs $6.50 and with the money users spent to purchase the game, it should be free of charge if you ask me (and probably everyone else).

Last week we ran an article about the way that Apple chose to comply with an order from a UK judge to set the record straight about their continuous claims that Samsung copied Apple with their Tab line of products. Although many read this as an order to apologize for slandering Samsung Apple did not see it that way and chose instead to only acknowledge the fact that the UK High Court had ruled that Samsung was not guilty of infringement and then followed that up with more claims that Samsung’s Tab Copied the iPad including a misleading statement that Samsung was found guilty in the US for this.

There is something interesting happening in the US; ok several something’s actually and we are not sure if they are good or bad at this point. The first is that there appear to be more judges actually looking into the claims that the copyright lobby are trying to claim when they go after individuals and even corporations for copyright infringement. We have watched as precedent has been set in the form of very unusual verdicts such as one handed down recently that states Web Sites are not responsible for links posted by their members which might violate copyright. This nice ruling means that the MPAA and RIAA must prove that the links were placed on a site by the owner or that they encouraged the posting of these links. Of course we have seen that the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright holders rarely stand on ceremony and will claim a site is encouraging piracy right out of the gate (we don’t need no stinking proof).  So while the ruling was rather monumental it did not stop the unsubstantiated take down requests and certainly is not going to help Megaupload or any other site in reality.

For about the last four months we have been talking about the decline of Apple. We are not saying that they are going to die, or go bankrupt or anything like that, but we are saying that they are no longer going to be the company that they once were. There are many reasons for this that we have covered including a lack of real innovation, a closed eco system, and one of the biggest ones; Tim Cook as CEO. To many this one may come as a surprise, but it is not that much of one really. Tim Cook is a businessman first and foremost. He was the one that proposed moving production and warehousing outside the US. He also has been instrumental in making other very business oriented decisions. However, while Tim Cook is good at running the day-to-day operations of a company, he is not the guy you want in charge at a place like Apple.

The system of Copyright, Patents and Trademarks has a long history in the US and around the world. Originally the system was developed to protect the individual inventor or artists. It allows them to benefit from their work or inventions for a limited period of time as a form of compensation for bringing a new technology or art to the world. This system worked very well when it was individuals who were seeking the protection. Patent laws at the time also required that the inventor be able to demonstrate their inventions before the patents were granted.

Last night the verdict was handed down from the jury in the Samsung V Apple and in a staggering leap of logic the 9 person jury found for that Samsung was guilty of willful infringement on the majority of patents that Apple presented, but that Apple had not infringed at all on the Samsung patents. Then they found that Samsung was not-guilty of Anti-Trust behavior for those attempting to enforce those same patents.  Although our initial reaction was shock, after reading the details of the verdict and taking into account how the trial was handled by Judge Lucy Koh we were actually not surprised.

There is a lot going on with the Samsung V Apple trial today as we head toward the final summations and then a jury decision. As we told you yesterday Judge Koh would like to see both sides compromise or to make peace entirely. She claims that there is danger to both sides if the trial goes to a jury. Although they jury cannot truly decide the validity of any patents in question they can still determine if one or the other has infringed. It is a situation that could see both sides impacted.