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Early this morning, Apple filed a lawsuit against the Taiwanese phone maker High Tech Computer (HTC) Corporation, alleging the company in infringing on more than 20 Apple owned patents in its mobile phones.
The lawsuit was filed in a U.S. District Court in Delaware and with the U.S. International Trade Commission today.
HTC is the maker of about 85-percent of all Windows Mobile powered devices, and also the maker of Google’s latest Android powered phone, the Nexus One.
We first reported on August 12, 2009 that a Texas-based court ruled in favor of i4i Corp, a Toronto-based firm, that ordered Microsoft to cease selling its popular Word program because of alleged patent infringement related to custom XML editing (U.S. Patent Number 5,787,449). The Texas-court in that ruling also fined Microsoft $240 million.
At that time, Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said, “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” and said the company would appeal.
The world’s largest online auction site, eBay, has been hit with a massive €1.7 million (USD $2.55 million) fine after the company has failed to adhere to a previous injunction that ruled the company wasn’t doing enough to block the sale of counterfeited Louis Vuitton products.
eBay is inching closer to selling it’s popular internet telephony service Skype after reaching an agreement with Joltid and Joost M.V. over patent infringement litigation.
The settlement did not come cheap. Skype founders Niklas Zennstorm and Janus Friis have given up a lot of equity, bringing their total stake in the company to 14-percent, in order for Joltid to drop litigation and to pass all rights to the questioned underlying VoIP technologies to Skype.
This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology
The digital signage industry is rapidly becoming aware of the privacy issues raised by interactivity and audience measurement techniques. There is, however, no industry-wide consensus about how to address those concerns. Some industry figures agree that privacy guidelines need to be adopted if audience measurement and other digital signage applications are to progress. Others, though, have referred to calls for the industry to be sensitive to privacy as “attacks” and have condemned privacy concerns as a lot of hype over nothing. The privacy issue is real, particularly if one considers the big picture of where digital out-of-home (DOOH) media is headed.
Toyota has announced the company would recall up to 3.8 million cars because of a problem with the removable floor mats on the drivers side.
Toyota says, “A stuck open accelerator pedal may result in very high vehicle speeds and make it difficult to stop the vehicle, which could cause a crash,”
Last August, a fatal crash occurred when a driver of a Lexus ES reported to an emergency operator of failing breaks and accelerating speeds, that car eventually crashed, subsequently killing four occupants.
A Texas-based court has just ruled in favor of a Toronto-based company, i4i Corp., in a patent dispute with Microsoft Corp.
The judge has ordered Microsoft to stop selling its popular document processing software Word 2003 and 2007 versions in the U.S. after Microsoft was found willingly infringing on patents obtained by i4i in 1998.
The judge also ordered Microsoft to pay US $290 million in damages to i4i, and has given Microsoft 60 days to comply.
This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology
Marketers are creating digital signs that can display targeted ads based on information they extract from examining the contours of individual human faces.
These smart signs are proliferating in commercial establishments and public places from New York’s Times Square to St. Louis area shopping malls. They are a powerful innovation in advertising, but one that raises compelling privacy issues – issues that should be addressed now, before digital signs that monitor our behavior become the new normal.
Waterloo-based Research In Motion (RIM) is looking to acquire Nortel’s CDMA and Long Term Evolution Access businesses, among other assets, for $1.1 billion.
Now, RIM is publicly accusing Nortel for intentionally blocking its acquisition bids mainly because RIM wants to buy additional Nortel assets.
The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, has unveiled today a new and more comprehensive consumer privacy policy set to take effect on August 23, 2009.
The company is updating the policy to better outline terms on newer channels such as electronic marketing, including SMS, and data collection and sharing.
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