The sad case of the ‘Star Wars kid‘ in Canada has been settled out of court. A teenager in Quebec made a video where he emulated the double lightsabre famously wielded by Darth Maul. The video was released on the internet by three other students, labeled as the “Star Wars Read more…
I must admit that I just came across the Open Invention Network (OIN). This is a company created last year by IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. Its purpose is to act as a patent pool which will accumulate a number of software patents that will be cross-licensed to Read more…
This is a story that has all the makings of a geek legend. A stupid bureaucrat in the city of Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the website belonging to the city that he administers was missing. What was in its place? An Apache Server page. The bureaucrat freaked. Imagine what he Read more…
A comment in IPKat has a link to the ruling for Baigent v Random House [2006] EWHC 719 (Ch). I’ve browsed through it (a good way of spending a Friday night). It is not particularly surprising, the ruling specifies that The Da Vinci Code did not constitute substantial copying of Read more…
The BBC is reporting that Dan Brown has won the preposterous case brought by writers Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who wrote the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, in which many plot ideas from The Da Vinci Code are based. The claimants argued that Brown had stolen Read more…
Lawyer Simon Hart has sent me this very interesting email, and has allowed its reproduction: I was involved in the recently decided Macrossan case [2006] EWHC 705 (Ch) before the High Court in England which I believe will be of interest to intellectual property lawyers and anyone who follows UK Read more…
Lucent sued Microsoft a couple of years ago over their U.S. patent 5,227,878 for a method for “Adaptive coding and decoding of frames and fields of video”. The first case was thrown out in 2005 because the patent contained a typo. This was corrected and now Lucent is at it Read more…
My recent interest in software patents have made me an observer of the U.S. patent system. You know that there is a problem when somebody can patent DVD rental and sue its competitors. This is what happens in the case of popular web-only DVD rental service Netflix, which has sued Read more…
Courts in the Guangdong province of China have upheld a ruling against Yan Yifan, a 20 ear-old man accused of stealing passwords for a Chinese MMORPG and entering into the accounts to steal online currency and equipment that has only a virtual existence. Yan received a $620 USD fine as Read more…
Some pretty good gags this year. IPKat reported that WIPO is about to launch a probe… into space. Wired had a collection of old classics (did you know that dihydrogen monoxide can kill?). Harry Potter fan websites The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet merged after their editors got married at Edinburgh Read more…