Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

In this day and age, it can be hard to keep your child from being exposed to Elon Musk. Although you may do your best on the home front, they may inevitably stumble across a profile piece or news item on TV at a friend’s house or the computer at the school library. For that reason, it’s better to be prepared for your child’s eventual exposure to Elon Musk and to know how to respond to the questions you may be asked.

Newegg is famous for fighting patent trolls, and the company is currently trying to win fees from several cases where it has won or the troll has given up. In one of those cases, Newegg fought a non-practicing entity called Pragmatus Telecom, which dropped its case against Newegg before discovery was complete. Newegg asked for attorneys fees but was rejected by the Delaware district court, which found that Newegg wasn't the "prevailing party"—in other words, it hadn't really won the case at all, so it couldn't be granted fees.

It's been two years since filmmakers making a documentary about the song "Happy Birthday" filed a lawsuit claiming that the song shouldn't be under copyright. Now, they have filed what they say is "proverbial smoking-gun evidence" that should cause the judge to rule in their favor.

The "smoking gun" is a 1927 version of the "Happy Birthday" lyrics, predating Warner/Chappell's 1935 copyright by eight years. That 1927 songbook, along with other versions located through the plaintiffs' investigations, "conclusively prove that any copyright that may have existed for the song itself... expired decades ago."

Almost all Android mobile devices available today are susceptible to hacks that can execute malicious code when they are sent a malformed text message or the user is lured to a malicious website, a security researcher reported Monday. The vulnerability affects about 950 million Android phones and tablets...

A new industry group called HEVC Advance is threatening to demand royalties for the new HEVC video codec that could halve the bandwidth required for streaming online video or offer higher resolutions with the same bandwidth usage. The organization is promising to demand a royalty of 0.5 percent of revenue from any broadcaster that uses the codec for streaming. This move could re-ignite the arguments surrounding video codecs on the Web and may well jeopardize services such as Netflix's year-old 4K streaming service.

Prenda Law is gone, and today it's a legit porno company, Malibu Media, that files more copyright lawsuits than anyone else. Malibu sues thousands of people for downloading the company's content via BitTorrent, then asks for settlements reportedly in the several-thousand-dollar range. The antics of Malibu and other "copyright trolls" are often documented on two pseudonymous troll-fighting blogs, FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie.

Patent trolls are so prolific these days that you don't really need to be successful to draw lawsuits. Case in point, a recently formed California company called TZU Technologies is demanding cash from six different players in the "virtual sex" industry—which barely even exists.

A few years ago, Google seemed to downgrade its patent search features, pulling away a separate "Google Patents" section and mixing it back into the main Google search. This seemed like a major step backwards, especially given how terrible the US Patent Office's own patent search engine was. Google has tried to do a few things like launching a "prior art finder" and teaming up with StackExchange to help crowdsource prior art. I'm not quite sure how well either program has gone, but Google has now upgraded its patent search efforts yet again to create a service that one would have hoped the patent office would have built itself, though it has not:

"Do it on the Internet" patents aren't cool anymore, for trolls, or for Rovi. A long-running patent battle between Netflix and Rovi has concluded, with Netflix beating back the entertainment guide company.

Two weeks after online retailer Newegg filed a petition complaining about "excessive and unreasonable" delays in getting a final judgment in its patent case, the judge in that case has handed Newegg a big win.

In an order published yesterday afternoon, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap ruled (PDF) that Newegg doesn't infringe a patent belonging to TQP Development, notwithstanding a 2013 jury verdict that granted $2.3 million to TQP, a "patent troll" with no business other than patent licensing.

Online retailer Newegg has developed a reputation for fighting hard against the kind of non-practicing patent holders often called "patent trolls." Now a long fight against one such entity, called SFA Systems, has reached a conclusion, and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied (PDF) Newegg's request to have its legal fees paid.

Assume the brace position: Boeing has received a patent for, I kid you not, a laser-powered fusion-fission jet propulsion system. Boeing envisions that this system could replace both rocket and turbofan engines, powering everything from spacecraft to missiles to airplanes.

A long-running copyright fight between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Universal Music over fair use in the digital age was considered by an appeals court today, a full eight years after the lawsuit began.

Online retailer Newegg has developed a reputation for taking on so-called "patent trolls," even when that means going through lengthy litigation and unpredictable jury trials.

Last month, the EFF faced down a lawsuit claiming that one of its "Stupid Patent of the Month" blog posts illegally defamed the inventor, a patent lawyer named Scott Horstemeyer. Days after the lawsuit became public, it was dropped.

This is unfortunate, even if it was somewhat expected: the Supreme Court has now rejected Google's request to hear its appeal over the appeals court decision that overturned a lower court ruling on the copyrightability of APIs. The lower court decision, by Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to understand the issues), noted that APIs were not copyrightable, as they were mere methods, which are not subject to copyright.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Google's appeal of the Google-Oracle API copyright dispute. The high court's move lets stand an appellate court's decision that application programming interfaces (APIs) are subject to copyright protections. Here is how we described the issue in our earlier coverage:

Tonight, at 23:59:59 on June 30, a leap second will be added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Instead of the clock rolling around to 00:00:00 on July 1 as per usual, the time will actually jump to 23:59:60 before finally ending up in July a second later. The previous leap second, which was inserted in June 2012, caused a number of high-profile technological issues, and it's likely that the leap tonight will cause some problems as well.

The jury found that Sprint violated US Patents No. 8,127,345 and 8,387,155, both of which describe methods of "managing access to protected computer resources." According to the complaint (PDF), filed in 2012, Sprint's Simply Everything Plan and Everything Data Plan are both methods of "controlling access to Sprint’s protected network resources," and thus infringe the patents.

As many as 600 million Samsung phones may be vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers to surreptitiously monitor the camera and microphone, read incoming and outgoing text messages, and install malicious apps, a security researcher said.