Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

New patent lawsuits hit an all-time high in November, with many plaintiffs likely hoping to avoid new pleading rules that came into effect yesterday. A whopping 790 lawsuits were filed last month, with at least 212 filed on a single day: Monday, November 30... Also no surprise: a big majority of the cases were filed in Eastern Texas.

Fox News is winning more than just the news network ratings wars. It's also winning the battle against copyright's fair use doctrine. In August, a federal judge sided (PDF) with the news station's copyright-infringement lawsuit against a television and radio clipping service known as TVEyes, which charges as much as $500 a month for its service. A New York federal judge ruled that wanton sharing, time searching, and downloading of Fox News' news segments is not fair use. Then in November, US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled TVEyes could not allow its clients—like the White House, American Red Cross, members of Congress, and others—to download Fox News clips.

Two releases ago, Fedora 21 introduced its namesake project's "Fedora Next" plan. The goal was simple—bring the massive, sprawling entity that is Fedora into some neatly organized categories that would clearly define the project's aims. And since Next launched, Fedora has been busy doing just that. The results are impressive, and it feels like the distro has found a renewed sense of purpose.

You might know Mozilla primarily for its Firefox browser, but for many years the company has also developed an e-mail client called Thunderbird. The two projects use the same rendering engine and other underlying technology, but Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla would like to stop supporting Thunderbird, calling its continuing maintenance "a tax" on the more important work of developing Firefox.

A Texas company is suing some of the biggest names in tech and retail, claiming their HTTPS websites infringe an encryption patent titled "Auto-Escrowable and Auto-Certifiable Cryptosystems." CryptoPeak Solutions has filed about six dozen cases in all, and they began hitting the patent-troll friendly venue of the Eastern District of Texas in July.

World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR) is reporting that the European Patent Office, EPO, has threatened Roy Schestowitz with a defamation lawsuit over a blog post he did. Schestowitz writes the Techrights blog, which I personally think can go overboard with some of its stories at times. However, to argue that his stories are defamation, especially by a government agency, is crazy.

The UK's 2014 private copying exception, which allowed you to make personal copies of your own music, including format-shifted versions, has now been definitively withdrawn, according to The 1709 Blog. As a result, it is once more illegal to make personal backups of your own music, videos or e-books, rip CDs and DVDs to standalone digital files, or upload your music to the cloud.

Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of "proactively establishing a third-party payment account." In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill.

Have you ever wanted a Raspberry Pi but thought that £16/$25—roughly three packs of cigarettes—was a little exorbitant for a complete computer capable of running Linux? Well, I have good news: the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Pi Zero, a single-board computer that costs just £4/$5.

For many years now, Western governments have been complaining about China's supposed lack of respect for intellectual monopolies, and constantly pushing the country's politicians to tighten the legal framework protecting them. To anyone not blinded by an unquestioning belief in the virtues of copyright and patent maximalism, it was pretty clear where this strategy would end.

For many years, Firefox developer Mozilla generated substantial income from a sponsorship deal with Google; the search and advertising firm paid Mozilla in return for Firefox making Google its default search engine. That deal was ended last year, with Firefox defaulting to Yahoo in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Baidu in China.

It turns out your home security camera may see more of your home than you thought it did. In a teardown of the Nest Cam, a team at ABI Research found that even when "off," the camera draws nearly the same amount of power as when it's fully powered on, meaning it's functional and running even when the indicator light claims otherwise.

Maybe it’s a matter of knowledge bias, but I usually wince when I see a discussion of intellectual property online. At best, people make mistakes. Only natural, nobody’s perfect, but we can strive. At worst, people completely misunderstand every aspect of the topic. And this is a topic that comes up a lot online, after all.

The diary of Anne Frank is just six weeks away from entering the public domain in most of Europe—but it might not happen. The Basel-based Anne Frank Fonds, which owns the copyright, has a plan to retain ownership until 2050...

...Most European copyrights end 70 years after the author's death, meaning that on Jan. 1, 2016, the diary becomes public domain in much of the continent. But the Anne Frank foundation has a new legal strategy to keep its most valuable copyright: declare that Otto Frank is actually a "co-author" of the diaries, not merely an editor. Since Otto Frank died in 1980, anything he authored will stay under copyright until 2050...

Since Valve started publicly talking about its own Linux-powered "Steam Boxes" about three years ago now, we've wondered what kind of effect a new gaming-focused OS would have on overall PC gaming performance. On the one hand, Valve said back in 2012 that it was able to get substantial performance increases on an OpenGL-powered Linux port of Left 4 Dead 2. On the other hand, developers I talked to about SteamOS development earlier this year told me that the state of Linux's drivers, OpenGL tools, and game engines often made it hard to get Windows-level performance on SteamOS, especially if a game was built with DirectX in mind in the first place.

In September, a judge ruled that music licensor Warner-Chappell doesn't own the copyright to "Happy Birthday." The question now seems to have become who does?

The Federal Communications Commission is trying to convince people that it isn't banning third-party router firmware such as DD-WRT despite issuing guidance that sounded an awful lot like a ban.

It ain't over yet, folks. While many in the press went on and on back in September that the song "Happy Birthday" had been declared in the "public domain," as we pointed out, that's not what the judge said. He only said that the Summy Co. did not hold the copyright, because it seemed clear from a lawsuit back in the 1940s that the Hill Sisters (who sorta wrote the song -- long story) only assigned the rights to the music and not the lyrics -- and everyone agrees the music is now in the public domain. As we pointed out, this actually made the song an "orphan work", which created a new kind of mess, and as we noted, it was entirely possible that a third party could now make a claim to holding the copyright -- though we thought it was unlikely.

Oh, how naive of us.

"This decision is a big win for the open Internet,” said Charles Duan, director of Public Knowledge’s Patent Reform Project. “By rejecting the ITC's attempt to expand its jurisdiction, the Federal Circuit helps to ensure that Internet users have unfettered access to the free flow of information that has proved so useful for innovation and free expression.”

One of my very first jobs in Silicon Valley was to try to help an internet startup get a big juicy contract with the US government (specifically the Department of Defense). The whole process was a disaster of epic proportions, in which I learned a ridiculous amount about government procurement, none of it good.