Business

While patent practitioners are well familiar with and accepting of the phrase that patentable subject matter may include "anything under the sun that is made by man," the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York recently heard arguments that may call the rationale behind that famous...

RealNetworks has ended its legal battle with Hollywood over its RealDVD software. The Motion Picture Association of America and Viacom filed suit against RealNetworks in 2008, alleging that RealDVD infringed on content producers' copyrights. RealDVD allowed users to save copies of DVDs to their comp...

The U.S. appears to be embarking on a new strategy for dealing with the restrictions China places on Internet companies, fueled in large part by Google's recent dustup with the Chinese government over its censorship demands. The company testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, ur...

In a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Intel's Paul Otellini announced the Invest in America Alliance, an effort led by Intel and a slew of venture capital firms, which promises to invest $3.6 billion in U.S.-based technology companies over the next two years. In addition, Int...

There's a common thread running throughout Google's latest legal worries: antitrust accusations, most notably several complaints filed with the European Commission. Last week, the EC opened an inquiry into Google's search ranking algorithm, based on claims of unfair practices made by three companies...

Palm's warning Thursday that revenues for fiscal year 2010 will be "well below" its forecast of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion has raised questions regarding its ability to survive as an independent company. The company's stocks closed at $6.53 Thursday, $1.56 down from the previous day's close of $8....

Document-sharing site Scribd.com launched a new feature Wednesday allowing users to easily transfer many of the site's 10 million books, magazines and documents to mobile devices, including Amazon's Kindle, the Nook e-reader and the Apple iPhone. The feature works differently for each device. For so...

The European Commission has notified Google that it received complaints from three companies about its search ranking practices. The companies are a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine, ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing. Foundem also filed a complaint with the ...

Once again, Americans are hearing that the United States is a cybersecurity wimp, vulnerable to major damage should it ever suffer a large, organized cyberattack. The latest testimony underscoring that notion came from Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, who spoke to the...

Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, announced on Wednesday the acquisition of Paglo, a remote support service provider. The purchase signals Citrix Online's entrance into the IT management sector. Citrix Online has relaunched the Paglo service as GoToManage. That service is an integrated We...

Global iPhone sales grew in 2009 at the expense of Windows Mobile devices, according to Gartner's worldwide mobile sales report, released Tuesday. The report also showed sales of Android and Research In Motion's Blackberry devices going up year over year. Overall, worldwide mobile phone sales fell ...

With its purchase of Vudu, an online service that delivers video to Internet-ready TVs and Blu-ray disc players, Walmart is hoping its sequel turns out better than its previous attempts to enter the online movie distribution business. The deal will put Walmart back in competion with the likes of Net...

A freelance security consultant working on behalf of the Chinese government was likely involved in the hack attacks that prompted Google to take a stand against China last month, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The man, who is in his 30s, did not launch the attack; rather, he wrote the code ...

If competition for Google is still "just a click away" -- as its executives kept saying last summer to anybody who would listen -- then the U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission made that click easier with their decisions this week to bless the Microsoft-Yahoo search technology merger....

Microsoft and Yahoo have received clearance for their search agreement from both the DoJ and the EC, the companies jointly announced Thursday, and they will soon begin implementing their plans. The process will involve porting Yahoo's algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft and making Yah...