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In enacting the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the DMCA, Congress ostensibly intended to stop copyright “pirates” from defeating DRM and other content access or copy restrictions on copyrighted works and to ban the “black box” devices intended for that purpose. In practice, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions haven’t had much impact on unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content. Instead, they’ve hampered lawful creativity, innovation, competition, security, and privacy.

The long legal war between Apple and Samsung reached the Supreme Court today. For the first time in a century, the High Court considered what the limits of "design patents" should be.

Until they took up a starring role in Apple v. Samsung, design patents were like the poor, long-lost cousins of the better-known "utility" patents that cover machines themselves. Here's how this long-lasting technology case made its way to the high court:

What looked like a solid defense win for Samsung in the second Apple v. Samsung litigation has suddenly slipped away, due to an opinion issued earlier today by the full US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Well here's an unexpected surprise. A lawsuit brought by the world's largest patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, and handled on appeal (as are all patent cases), by the notoriously awful Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) may have actually killed off software patents. Really. ... But the part that has everyone chattering is the concurring opinion by Judge Haldane Mayer, that says it's time to face facts: Alice killed software patents. And Mayer is not some newcomer.

An East Texas jury concluded late Friday that Apple must pay a patent troll $302.4 million in damages for infringing two patents connected to Apple's FaceTime communication application.

The verdict is the third in the long-running case in which two earlier verdicts were overturned—one on appeal and the other by the Tyler, Texas federal judge presiding over the 6-year-long litigation.

Last year, the UK decided to repeal a part of its copyright law that enforced a drastically reduced copyright term for "industrially exploited artistic works" including "works of artistic craftsmanship" — in other words, the industrial design of manufactured objects that are primarily functional, like appliances and furniture. Rather than the full life-plus-seventy term, the copyright on such works was limited to 25 years from the date of manufacturing...

... In any case, the rule was repealed and it was repealed retroactively:

Then on to the main show: Oracle's claim that Google hid the plans to make Android apps work on Chrome OS. Google had revealed to Oracle its "App Runtime for Chrome" (ARC) setup, and it was discussed by Oracle's experts, but at Google I/O, Google revealed new plans for apps to run in Chrome OS that were not using ARC, but rather a brand new setup, which Google internally referred to as ARC++. Oracle argued that Google only revealed to them ARC, but not ARC++ and that was super relevant to the fair use argument, because it showed that Android was replacing more than just the mobile device market for Java. But, here's Oracle's big problem: Google had actually revealed to Oracle the plans for ARC++. It appears that Oracle's lawyers just missed that fact. Ouch.

The Linux kernel today faces an unprecedented safety crisis. Much like when Ralph Nader famously told the American public that their cars were "unsafe at any speed" back in 1965, numerous security developers told the 2016 Linux Security Summit in Toronto that the operating system needs a total rethink to keep it fit for purpose.

"The software update that prevented the use of third-party ink was reportedly distributed in March, but this anti-feature itself wasn't activated until September," EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow wrote in a letter to HP Inc. CEO Dion Weisler. "That means that HP knew, for at least six months, that some of its customers were buying your products because they believed they were compatible with any manufacturer's ink, while you had already planted a countdown timer in their property that would take this feature away.

The legacy copyright industries keep insisting that it's "easy" to recognize when something is infringing and thus it's "easy" to stop copyright infringement. They're very, very wrong on both counts for a variety of reasons. We could go into the details for why, but it's easier to just let them show us themselves. Not too long ago we wrote about Warner Bros. issuing DMCA takedown notices on its own sites (and also Amazon and IMDB links for its movies), and now TorrentFreak alerts us to Paramount issuing a DMCA takedown on a torrent of Ubuntu, the popular version of Linux that many people use all the time.

The vulnerabilities, which are similar in severity to the Stagefright family of bugs disclosed last year, have been fixed in updates Google began distributing Tuesday. A large percentage of Android phones, however, aren't eligible to receive the fixes. Even those that do qualify don't receive them immediately (the September updates are currently not available as over-the-air downloads for either of the Nexus 5X devices in my household). That gives attackers crude blueprints for exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unpatched on millions of devices.

Open up your wallets—Sony might have as much as $55 for you. PlayStation 3 owners who lost the ability to run Linux on their consoles following a 2010 firmware update should soon be getting a notice from the console maker that it is settling a class-action lawsuit over the debacle.

The sale of a computer equipped with pre-installed software isn't an unfair commercial practice because most customers prefer to buy a laptop they can use straight away, Europe’s top court has ruled in a victory for Sony.

In August 2011, multiple servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel were infected with malware that gave an unknown intruder almost unfettered access. Earlier this week, the five-year-old breach investigation got its first big break when federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing a South Florida computer programmer of carrying out the attack.

BT is taking legal action in the US against games company Valve for allegedly infringing on four of the UK telecoms giant's patents. A BT spokesperson told Ars: "BT can confirm that it has commenced legal proceedings against Valve Corporation by filing a claim with the US District Court of Delaware for patent infringement. The patents in question relate to online computer or video gaming platforms, digital distribution services, and personalised access to online services and content."

On August 30, 2016, the Patent Office issued U.S. Patent No. 9,430,468, titled; "Online peer review and method." The owner of this patent is none other than Elsevier, the giant academic publisher. When it first applied for the patent, Elsevier sought very broad claims that could have covered a wide range of online peer review. Fortunately, by the time the patent actually issued, its claims had been narrowed significantly. So, as a practical matter, the patent will be difficult to enforce. But we still think the patent is stupid, invalid, and an indictment of the system.

Fedora 24 is very near the best Linux distro release I've used, and certainly the best release I have tested this year. Considering 2016 has welcomed new offerings like Mint 18 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, that says a great deal about the Fedora project's latest work. But like many Fedora releases before it, even Fedora 24 got off to a rocky start.

While Windows 10 is generally well-liked by reviewers and users, it's relatively clear that it's not the OS to choose if you actually want to control how much babbling your OS does over the network. While a lot of complaints about Windows 10 have been proven to be hyperbole or just plain wrong (like it delivers your BitTorrent behavior to Hollywood or it makes use of menacing keyloggers), Windows 10 is annoyingly chatty, sending numerous reports back to Microsoft even when the operating system is configured to be as quiet and private as possible.

Android's release schedule has historically been all over the place, but for the last few years we've gotten roughly one major release per year, occasionally punctuated with medium-sized maintenance releases, minor feature updates, and monthly security patches. Now, the latest of Google's blog posts about the Android Nougat release suggests things will become more predictable in the future.

The Google Transparency Project is a Washington, DC group that's laser-focused on letting Americans know about Google's lobbying efforts. To get its message out, GTP has worked with journalists at Re/Code and The Intercept, which have run stories about Google's many visits to the White House, the prevalence of ex-Googlers in the US Digital Service, and other links. What wasn't known, until today, is who was paying the bills for research by the "nonprofit watchdog" group. "The folks running the Google Transparency Project won’t say who is paying for it, which is odd for a group devoted to transparency," noted Fortune's Jeff John Roberts, one of many journalists who the group reached out to in April.