Tech Law

Mobile equipment maker Ericsson filed patent infringement suits Friday against Samsung, saying its rival was using a variety of its technologies without authorization. Sweden-based Ericsson filed suit against Samsung in the U.S., UK, Germany and The Netherlands. The actions came after talks aimed at...

Research In Motion continued to score victories at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week, with another disputed patent held by NTP ruled to be invalid -- but the BlackBerry service faces a critical courtroom showdown on Friday. That's when a judge will hold a long-awaited hearing on whether...

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic. "We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew ...

Microsoft's rivals on Wednesday banded together to bring a new charge against the software giant to the European Commission: unfair competition. Microsoft "threatens to deny enterprises and individual consumers real choice," the European Committee for Interoperable Systems argued. The ECIS was forme...

Can reviewing the path of a cab ride shared by quarrelling inventors be a better solution to a patent dispute than years-long litigation that could otherwise reach up to the U.S. Supreme Court? Jorge Goldstein, managing director at the firm of Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein and Fox, based in Washington,...

Most electronics consumers had never heard of rootkits before last year's Sony BMG debacle. Now, rootkits have the attention of the U.S. public -- and the U.S. government. The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday suggested that a measure outlawing the controversial software may be in order. A...

Research In Motion has alleviated -- just a little -- the worries of 2 million or so BlackBerry users who would be affected if the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va., should levy an injunction against the service later this month. RIM said on Thursday that it has developed and tested software wor...

Nortel said it has reached an agreement in principle to pay US$2.4 billion to settle shareholder lawsuits stemming from accounting misstatements at the telecom gear maker, moving the beleaguered company one step closer to ending a dark chapter in its history. The settlement would avoid at least one ...

Microsoft has been promised a late April hearing in Europe's Court of First Instance for its appeal of the European Commission's antitrust sanctions. At the same time, the software giant has agreed to open its source code to competitors in the latest installment of its long-running dispute over how...

After months of adverse court rulings in the U.S., Research in Motion (RIM) won a key decision from a patent court in the United Kingdom and may get help from the U.S. government in avoiding an abrupt shutdown of its BlackBerry mobile e-mail service. In the UK, RIM said a patent court had ruled that...

A lawsuit against eBay filed two years ago by Tiffany -- a high-end jeweler whose prices are based as much on its brand name as on quality and craftsmanship -- is moving forward and is expected to go to trial by the end of this year. The Tiffany suit joins a number of earlier legal filings against t...

A patent dispute has erupted between Visto, a provider of secure push e-mail services for mobile phones, and Good Technology. The lawsuit, which alleges that Good's products and services infringe on multiple patents held by Visto, was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas...

Moving a nearly two-year-long investigation and prosecution closer to its conclusion, Japanese chipmaker Elpida has agreed to pay US$84 million to end charges that it conspired with other firms to fix prices. Elpida agreed to plead guilty to conspiring with other manufacturers to set prices of dynam...

The characters in the wildly popular, extremely violent and graphically explicit video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" face crackdowns from police and other authorities responding to their evil doings. Now the real life backers of the game are facing a crackdown of their own. The City of Los An...

When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was originally passed in 2002, many companies were less than enthusiastic about it. Concerns about the additional accountability and the internal changes that would need to take place weighed heavily on the minds of many company executives. These concerns turned out to b...