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All posts tagged "legal"


Friday, August 27, 2010

Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Launches Patent Suit Volley

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 05:00 PM

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...2.html?mod=e2tw

"They're the everyday fixtures of the Internet experience: pop-up stock quotes on a website, suggestions for related reading near a news article, videos along the side of your screen. Now, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen says he owns the technology behind all these ideas, and he's demanding that some of the world's top Web companies pay up to use them."

Above: He's the dude with the beard.

I've come down hard on patent trolls before, and though I have respect for Allen as the co-founder of Microsoft, the patents he's suing eBay, Google, Facebook, and others for seem like they have the whiff of troll on them. Check them out:

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,263,507:Allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social-networking sites. (Accused violators: AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, YouTube)

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,034,652, U.S. PATENT NO. 6,788,314:Enables ads, stock quotes, news updates or video images to flash on a computer screen, peripherally to a user's main activity. (AOL, Apple, Google, Yahoo)

U.S. PATENT NO. 6,757,682:Allows readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject, among other things. (AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, YouTube)

Do those seem like true innovations to you? Or more like obvious evolutions of previously established technologies? Should software even be patentable at all?


Monday, July 26, 2010

Sorry Bloggers, the DMCA Will Not Crumble Here Today

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 11:00 AM

http://blog.laptopmag.com/court-rul...ile+Technology)

"On Friday, a Federal Court of Appeals judge issued a ruling with potentially important implications for music and movie rippers. In the case of MGE UPS Systems Inc. vs GE Consumer and Industrial Inc, the court ruled that GE employees did not violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) when they bypassed security dongles in order to repair some of MGE's uninterruptible power supplies."

The DMCA, the most frustrating piece of legislation ever written from a technology geek perspective, isn't going anywhere just yet. Laptop Magazine's Avram Piltch (is it me, or does that sound like the name of a Harry Potter character?) nails the issue exactly: there's no encryption being broken here. It would be akin to your DVD player at home needing a special dongle to start up, but the DVD you're putting in for playback having no encryption on it whatsoever. That's not the way things work though, and thus the DMCA hasn't been overruled. Like every other blogger writing about this, I'm not a lawyer either, but I think the judge understood exactly what he was doing with this ruling.


Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Microsoft, Yahoo, RealNetworks Sued Over Music Copyrights

Posted by Adam Krebs in "Digital Home News" @ 10:46 PM

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10276724-27.html

"The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody. Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there's a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn't mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights)."

Credit: ars technica

Chalk this one up to another ridiculous abuse of broken music copyright system. The plaintiffs are demanding $150,000 for each violation (for each recorded song - the six Greatest Hits versions of Conway Twitty's "Fifteen Years Ago" would consitute $900,000 in damages alone) or the amount the companies earned from streaming these songs, whichevever is more. This sets a disturbing precident in downloadable music, where none of these companies can afford to lose the case. If all damages are awarded, the 200 violations could end up costing somewhere in the range of billions of dollars, which is why a settlement for far less money is likely to occur. But this case, and the similar trial against Jammie Thomas-Rasset (where the defendant was ordered to pay $80,000 in damages per song) raises the point: if the penalties are so outrageously high that they aren't going to be enforced, why bother having them on the lawbooks in the first place? Everyone deserves to be paid for their work, but today's broken copyright system clearly misses the point in many ways. It's time to get with the 21st century and abandon the sheet music-based system of years past.


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