Tech Law

Lindows.com and Microsoft today announced that the two companies have reached a worldwide settlement in the trademark-infringement cases between the two companies. "This case was centered on the fundamentals of international trademark law and our necessary efforts to protect the Windows trademark ag...

Broadcom announced today that it has settled all outstanding patent and antitrust litigation with Microtune. Under the settlement agreement, all outstanding claims in pending litigation between the parties will be dismissed with prejudice. The parties also entered into reciprocal releases covering a...

In the U.S. government's case to block Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft, the federal judge overseeing the proceedings has pushed for both sides to make more information public, and has taken an active role in questioning witnesses. In the case's first week of testimony, Judge Vaughn Walker told l...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken additional steps in its fight against music piracy by issuing nearly 500 more lawsuits against alleged music file-sharers. This action brings the total number of individuals it has sued to nearly 3,000. While the RIAA doesn't yet know th...

Toysrus.com has sued Amazon.com, the company that has run its online store since early 2000, claiming the e-tail giant violated an exclusivity agreement and seeking $200 million in damages. The online wing of Toys 'R' Us claims Amazon is in breach of the original agreement between the two companies ...

As part of its legal wrangling with The SCO Group, IBM has filed a motion for summary judgment in an attempt to remove copyright claims from the multibillion-dollar lawsuit. In its request, Big Blue cited a lack of evidence from SCO that would prove wrongdoing on IBM's part. The copyright claims in ...

Gateway has filed suit against rival Hewlett-Packard, broadening a patent dispute that arose nearly two months ago. In the claim, the company alleges HP violated five separate patents held by Gateway. Gateway is seeking unspecified damages and asking that all of the claims HP filed in its own mid-Ma...

Memory-chip designer Rambus has filed a billion-dollar lawsuit, claiming the four largest manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips -- Micron Technology, Hynix Semiconductor, Siemens AG and Infineon Technologies -- conspired to squelch demand for its products. The 36-page complaint ...

In the first case brought under the CAN-SPAM Act that took effect January 1st, U.S. federal officials have charged four men from suburban Detroit, Michigan, with bombarding consumers with unwanted e-mail messages. Prosecutors alleged the men sent more than a million messages attempting to sell bogus...

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched its most comprehensive attack to date on software, music and movie piracy, conducting more than 100 raids in 10 countries and seizing scores of computers. Authorities said the computers and servers they confiscated contain nearly $50 million worth of illeg...

Halting in mid-trial the only state-level antitrust case to make it to court, Microsoft and consumers in the state of Minnesota have reached a tentative agreement to settle all claims against the computer software giant. Terms of the settlement will not be announced until details are finalized and a...

AMD has announced the settlement of patent claims with Intergraph in an agreement that calls for AMD to pay Intergraph $10 million, plus 2 percent of profits from its microprocessor sales for three years. The maximum payment from AMD is to be capped at $25 million. In return, Intergraph will grant A...

Microsoft has settled a long-simmering patent-infringement complaint with InterTrust Technology, agreeing to pay $440 million to license all of the firm's digital rights management (DRM) technology. Settlement of the patent claims, which were first filed in 2001, is just the latest move by Microsoft...

Dell and Intel have been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit that claims the two companies pilfered graphic display technology developed by a small California company. The company, MicroUnity Systems Engineering, claims that technology used in almost all Intel Pentium III and Pentium 4 chips to d...

The European Union has issued a scathing denouncement of Microsoft's business practices, levied a record fine of just under $612 million and ordered a stripped-down version of Windows -- without Windows Media Player -- to be made available within 90 days. In response, Microsoft announced its intenti...