Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

MARSHALL,TX—The story of Michael Jones, his mysterious invention, and the massive patent enforcer he's working with is finally coming out at a patent trial underway in this small East Texas town. Jones' patent, now owned by famed patent enforcer Erich Spangenberg, has scared corporate America into writing one hefty check after another to avoid a trial just like this one. The sums of those checks were revealed in court here on Tuesday when a TQP attorney displayed to the jury a spreadsheet with many of the payments.

The jury in the Apple v. Samsung damages retrial came to a verdict on Thursday, finding that Samsung now owes an additional $290 million. This brings the total damages bill for Samsung to around $900 million for the entire affair.

Last week, we wrote about Microsoft's intense, and somewhat dishonest, lobbying to try to remove one aspect of proposed patent reform: the covered business methods program, which would have allowed approved technology patents to get reviewed by the Patent Office much more quickly. It was based on Senator Chuck Schumer's plan, which enabled the same feature for patents related to financial services. Many have seen that Schumer's effort was somewhat successful in stopping bad financial services patents, and so it makes sense to do the same thing for software as well. In fact, it makes more sense, since so many patent lawsuits and patent troll shakedowns involve software-related patents.

As we've noted many times in the past, there is almost no real punishment for filing false takedowns. The "penalty of perjury" language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent -- and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file's copyright is held by the party being represented. And, in the lawsuit, Warner Bros. is relying on that to try to avoid getting hit with a perjury claim. Basically, the company is saying: sure, sure, we lied and pulled down content we had no right to pull down, but the law is so laughably weak and in our favor that screw you all, it doesn't matter what we take down. While WB actually did "agree" to a more strict perjury clause in agreeing to Hotfile's terms, it's now arguing that the terms it agreed to don't count because they're different from the DMCA:

At a presentation in a conference room inside the US Capitol on Friday, Schneier—who has been helping The Guardian review the trove of documents provided by Snowden—said that in its haste to "weaponize" the Internet, the NSA has broken its mechanisms of security. And those breaks—including the backdoors that the NSA convinced or coerced software developers to put into the implementations of their encryption and other security products, are so severe that it is now just a matter of time before others with less-noble causes than fighting terrorism will be able to exploit the holes the NSA has created.

Schneier said that the vulnerabilities inserted into security products by the NSA through its BULLRUN program could easily be exploited by criminals and other nation-states as well once they are discovered. And the other attacks and surveillance methods used by the NSA "will be tomorrow's doctoral theses and next week's Science Fair projects."

Who is Michael Jones, and what did he invent? After a five years of legal battles over Jones’ patent, involving hundreds of lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in payments, that question still has no clear answer.

Whatever the invention, hundreds of companies have paid tribute to it. Jones’ patent, now wielded through a holding company called TQP Development, has become one of the most widely asserted patents in history. In complaints, TQP lawyers have accused website after website of patent infringement for using one of the most common Web-encryption strategies: combining the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol with the RC4 encryption algorithm. But Jones didn’t invent SSL or RC4, an algorithm invented in 1987, two years before the filing date of the Jones patent.

In order to fully appreciate what the CyanogenMod team has accomplished with their new installer, here's a rough overview of what installing an Android ROM has typically been like in the past. It's mostly a series of archaic command line entry and user input that is so convoluted, it often sounds like a video game cheat code. The full, old instructions for many devices are still on the CyanogenMod Wiki.

Today, federal judge Denny Chin rejected a copyright challenge Google’s practices of scanning books into digital format and presenting snippets of those scans in search results because the practices qualify as fair use. It’s an exciting and hard-fought victory for Google, one that took nearly a decade of litigation and many millions of dollars to achieve. Still, this ruling merely preserves the status quo, last year a related case (the HathiTrust case) already found fair use for similar facts, and a Second Circuit ruling earlier this year signaled that Google probably would qualify for a fair use defense. So is this ruling a big deal? Yes and no.

A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors' Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning is "fair use." In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don't break copyright, and Google doesn't need the authors' permission to engage in the scanning and display of short bits of books.

One of the most hotly debated ideas for patent reform is to expand what's known as the Covered Business Methods program, which creates a streamlined process for challenging patents. Advocates argue that expanding the CBM program would help to invalidate low-quality patents that are the weapon of choice for patent trolls.

But not everyone in the technology sector is enthusiastic about the idea. The BSA, an industry group that used to call itself the Business Software Alliance, counts patent-rich software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and Apple among its members. And in recent weeks it has been a leading voice opposing the expansion of the CBM program...

An eight-person jury was picked yesterday, and today the Apple v. Samsung damages re-trial swung into full steam, moving through opening statements and speeding through four witnesses.

The problems with DRM for videos, music, ebooks and games are well known. Despite those issues for the purchasers of digital goods, companies love DRM because it gives them control over how their products are used -- something that has been much harder to achieve in the analog world. The risk is that as digital technologies begin to permeate traditional physical products, they will bring with them new forms of DRM, as this post by Karsten Gerloff about Zoe, one of Renault's electric cars, makes clear:

Cyanogen Inc., the newly created company that produces the popular custom Android ROM CyanogenMod, published a new app called CyanogenMod Installer which will unlock the user’s boot loader, root their device, and flash CyanogenMod to their phone with minimal extra effort. The free app is available over Google Play, and when it's paired with equally free desktop software, this can replace a phone's operating system with Cyanogen Inc.'s highly customizable version of Android.

Six months ago, Facebook announced that its Open Compute Project (OCP) would develop a top-of-rack switch that could boot nearly any type of networking software. With the help of Intel, Broadcom, and others, the consortium devoted to open hardware specifications would develop a rival to Cisco's network hardware.

Over the last few years, Next Media Animation has become something of a cult hit for their famed "Taiwanese animation" of various news events. We've written about them a few times, such as when they did a news animation of the outrage over TSA scans and again when they took on SOPA. The folks over there got in touch to let us know that they recently did one on patent trolls which is amusing, in their unique style (though this one is in English, rather than Chinese with English subtitles):

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has provided a federal judge with testimony from 22 separate advocacy organizations detailing how the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass telephone records collection program has impeded the groups' work, discouraged their members and reduced the numbers of people seeking their help via hotlines. The declarations accompanied a motion for partial summary judgment filed late Wednesday, in which EFF asks the court to declare the surveillance illegal on two levels—the law does not authorize the program, and the Constitution forbids it.

If you're a student or teacher in a computer science school of a big college, chances are good that you pick stronger passwords than your peers in the arts school. In turn, the arts students usually pick better passwords than those in the business school, according to research presented this week.

The landmark study is among the first to analyze the plaintext passwords that a sizable population of users choose to safeguard high-value accounts...

Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, has been fending off criticism from privacy advocates because the desktop search tool in recent versions of the operating system also searches the Internet. That means if you're searching your desktop for a file or application, you might also see results from Amazon or other websites. One person who dislikes Canonical's search tool is Micah Lee, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who maintains the HTTPS Everywhere project and is CTO of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Lee set up a website called "Fix Ubuntu," which provides instructions for disabling the Internet search tool.

One of the businesses of the multifaceted Rovi Corporation is the creation of "interactive program guides," like the ones you might see on the DVR that comes with your cable or satellite service. Cable companies like Comcast buy Rovi's online guide services. There are other video-on-demand companies that don't want to use Rovi's guide services, but Rovi wants them to pay up anyway. The company believes the trove of patents it has acquired over the years mean it owns rights to a wide array of what are essentially online television guides.

About a year and a half ago, we wrote about "Rockstar Consortium," a shell company set up by Apple and Microsoft (and a few other companies), in which they placed many of the patents they received when they outbid Google to get Nortel's patents. We noted at the time that one of the reasons regulators let Apple, Microsoft, RIM and others team up to buy these patents without it being an antitrust concern was that they promised that all the patents would be able to be licensed on "reasonable terms." Except... once they handed them off to Rockstar, that company's CEO, John Veschi, noted that this promise "does not apply to us."