Displaying items by tag: Legal

Kim Dotcom has announced that he filed a lawsuit against New Zealand due to the illegal spying and search of his home which happened in 2012.

One thing that I find sadly funny is when one company accuses another of patent abuse. It is one of those statements that really spells out just how disingenuous most corporations are. However as a rule, most large corporations have people that are paid to mask the truth at least to come degree. In today’s episode of pot meets kettle we find Microsoft accusing Google of patent abuse after winning a victory against Google in court. Google (through Motorola) was trying to get certain Microsoft products banned from import.

Yesterday we talked about how the social network gaming company Zynga was having a rough time of things. Now we are hearing that they could be pulling off a desperation move by suing another company over trademark infringement. The culprit here is the developer behind the adult app Bang with Friends (who has the same name as the app). Now, while we could see Zynga getting a little upset over the title for a few reasons not the least of which is associating this title with their kid friendly games that have the same naming scheme. However to try and claim trademark infringement because of the “with friends” part is a little much.

As expected US District Judge Denise Cote found that Apple did collude with five publishers to fix eBook prices in 2010. Although it appeared to come as a shock to some it was something that many analysts saw as inevitable. Apple faced a mountain of evidence that showed Apple acting to push the new “agency” model and then establish price guides for new books. These caps on eBook prices (along with the most favored nation clause) are what allowed Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster to move away from the $9.99 that Amazon was setting to $12.99 and $14.99.

Google at the beginning of 2012 changed their policy regarding the privacy of users of their services. Despite the fact that months earlier they warned users about future changes, users did not have too many choices, they could continue to use the service under the new rules or cancel the services.

When Microsoft bought Skype it was to deal with a couple of issues. One of the big ones was to remove a competitor in the communications market and the other was to make sure they were not going to get sued for the direction their own communications services were taking. Microsoft had been floundering in the consumer market despite the multiple changes they tried to make to their messenger product. While their enterprise messaging software was complicated and expensive to maintain and to properly integrate with other messaging services. To combat this Microsoft was already looking to make their messaging services much more like Skype than they were.

According to Ars Technica, the U.S. Homeland Security closed a key account for mobile payment associated with Bitcoin Stock Exchange Mt. Gox. This is the account Dwolla owned by Mutum Sigillum (Mt. Gox property) from which resources are paid to the account of Mt. Goxa which is the largest Bitcoin exchange on the Internet. For those who do not know, Dwolla was the easiest way of buying Bitcoin as other services for online payment, such as PayPal, for example, do not give the option to purchase Bitcoin.

A Certain Jens R., a 33 years old German citizen, who owns the site torrent.to, normally located on servers in Russia, received three years and 10 months in prison at the court in the German city of Aachen. As owners of The Pirate Bay, in his case, he is charged for illegal distribution of copyrighted content. In addition, Jens is still under investigation for false report of bankruptcy and embezzlement.

U.S. startup CoinLab filed a lawsuit against the Japanese Mt. Gox, the largest Internet Exchange of Bitcoin in the world, for allegedly violating mutual agreement. Seeking damages of 75 million real, not virtual dollars for the suffered damage.

Bad video games are nothing new there are about as many of them as there are bad TV shows and movies. However, even when a producer knows that a TV show or movie is bad they still are going to do everything they can to get people to go and see it. There are many techniques that are used to do this, but one of my least favorites is when they dig through the move and show you all the “good parts” in a trailer in order to entice you into spending your money. Now although this is bad it is not really illegal, just very misleading and dishonest. So what would you do is the scenes shown in an ad were not actually in the movie, or looked nothing like the final picture? Would it be false advertising? Would it make things worse if the CEO of the movie studio claimed that the scenes were part of the movie? I am sure that it would oddly enough this exact thing has happened, but with a game instead of a movie.