EBay’s plan to sell a 65 percent stake in Skype to a group of private investors is going to be a bit more difficult to pull off than expected. This afternoon, Joltid, a company owned by Skype’s founders, filed a copyright suit against eBay and the consortium of investors that just paid $1.9 billion for a majority interest in it.
It’s not the $974.5 million TiVo had been looking for, but the $200 million in sanctions against EchoStar’s Dish Network the company has been awarded isn’t exactly petty cash, either. On Friday, a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Texas ordered the satellite broadcaster to cough up that sum for its continued infringement of TiVo’s “multimedia time warping system” patent.
AT&T and Verizon have run afoul of TiVo’s video patents. Reporting a second-quarter loss and projected results below Wall Street expectations Wednesday, the digital video recorder pioneer said it is suing the two telecoms for infringing on its patents for technology that allows DVRs to simultaneously store and play back programs, pause live television and deliver other features.
The long-standing legal dispute between Toys R Us and Amazon has been resolved in the toy retailer’s favor, but at a much discounted price. In a regulatory filing submitted to the SEC Friday, Amazon said it has agreed to pay Toys R Us $51 million to settle claims that it violated a former exclusivity agreement with the company.
2009 is proving to be a year of dubious distinction for Microsoft in patent litigation. On Wednesday the company was ordered to pay $200 million to Toronto-based i4i for willfully infringing its patents.
Tough break for Google. An Illinois software developer has sued the company, along with some four dozen others, alleging that they infringed on his trademark on the word “android.” Seems Erich Specht, who runs Android Data Corporation, holds the mark on the term “Android Data.”
With its speech synthesizers, brain current-operated controls and solar power source, the device described in Monec Holding’s patent–“electronic device, preferably an electronic book”–would seem to have little in common with Apple’s iPhone. Still, it is a “light-weight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” and “a power source.” And these days, that’s enough file suit over…
Looks the three-hour deposition Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave in the so-called “Vista Capable” class action suit was for naught. A judge Wednesday ruled that the lawsuit, which has troubled Microsoft for nearly two years now, cannot go forward as a class action.
If there was an Emmy Award for legislation production, NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker would surely win it. Last October he called upon Congress to pass a bill that would create a dedicated intellectual-property enforcement bureau and today it’s looking more and more like he’s going to get it.
This week members of the House [...]
The Recording Industry Association of America demands damages of $150,000 per song for file-sharing infringements, yet it pays the artists who create those songs pennies for their work. And now it wants to pay them even less.
The RIAA and its online counterpart, the Digital Media Association, have petitioned the Copyright Royalty Board to slash the [...]
OLPC is proving as apt an acronym for “One Lawsuit Per Child” as it is for “One Laptop Per Child.” Lagos Analysis Corp., the Nigerian company that claims the nonprofit stole its design for a multilingual keyboard, has put a dollar amount on the damages in its patent-infringement suit against OLPC, and it’s a jaw-dropper: [...]
A $9,250 per-song fine might seem an excessive punishment for illegally sharing music for no personal gain, but it’s really not. According to the U.S. Justice Department, anyway.
The DOJ says the $222,000 in damages awarded to the Recording Industry Association of America in the Virgin Records America et al. v. Thomas copyright-infringement case is constitutional. [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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