Yahoo is suing small company Xfire for alleged patent infringement. Xfire provides a chat application that allows online gamers to chat with each other. However, Yahoo claims that it owns a software patent that protects precisely that, U.S. patent 6,699,125. This patent, applied for in 2001, claims to protect a Read more…
The RIAA has reached a new low in their tactics of suing P2P users. According to The Register, they have sued a dead woman. I love this line: “An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case.” Yep, nobody is safe from the RIAA.
This is a Distance Learning LL.M. we are going to start in Edinburgh. If you fancy spending a year (or two) studying Technology Law but can’t be bothered to travel abroad, then we will happily make you feel welcome with the distance LL.M.
You want to get more money for your industry (which is already a very profitable one). What do you do? You ask people to turn in their bosses for software piracy after you leave the company. I was reading The Onion when I came across this ad: Being The Onion, Read more…
(Registration required, remember to use Bugmenot). So, BitTorrent is making TV execs uneasy in the United States. It was meant to happen, as torrent technology is quite fast, but not as fast as the article would make us believe. I still cringe at the use of the word “stealing”, the Read more…
Check this out. The Eiffel Tower’s website specifies that the nighttime Eiffel Tower is protected by copyright, therefore all nighttime pictures of the famous tower that are not licensed are infringing copyright. I have done some research and it seems like the Société Nouvelle de la Tour Eiffel (SNTE) claims Read more…
MP3.com was one of the early pioneers of online music sharing. It started offering direct links to MP3s, which was shut down easily by the music industry. Afterwards, MP3.com has been offering music from emerging groups that want to offer their music online. Now MP3.com will open a novel music Read more…
Software patents are a serious problem for open source developers according to Linus Torvalds and other open source superstars, despite IBM’s legally binding pledge not to enforce 500 software patents against OSS companies. This should not surprise anybody. With almost every single obvious element of software already patented in the Read more…
Teoma is a new search engine that follows a similar idea to that of Google Scholar, it tries to filter searches to give sources that have certain authority. It does this by producing searches that are linked to by pages with the similar topic. I have tried it with some Read more…
This is an excellent rant from Ed Felten’s blog Freedom to Tinker, where he asks something that has been on my mind recently. Why is Hollywood complaining about the evils of movie downloading, when profits are at its highest levels ever. Why are we told that there is a problem Read more…