Tech Law

Saying his company's hostile bid to acquire PeopleSoft is anything but dead, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has stated he remains committed to seeing the deal through to the end. Meanwhile, rival IBM reportedly has told the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division, which is weighing whether or not ...

After flooding ISPs and universities with thousands of subpoenas targeting individual consumers, the Recording Industry Association of America has moved from threats to open warfare, filing 261 lawsuits against those whom it terms the most egregious offenders -- users caught sharing more than 1,000 ...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is planning to offer file swappers a reprieve from prosecution, provided they adhere to certain conditions, according to published reports. People who have illegally downloaded copyrighted music files allegedly would be required to destroy all of ...

Hoping to squelch Oracle's hostile takeover attempt and alter the face of the software industry, PeopleSoft has released what it says is evidence that Oracle's proposed purchase is intended primarily to harm the smaller company's business. The new evidence renews debate over Oracle's true intentions...

Amazon.com has sued 11 entities in the United States and Canada for forging its domain name in their e-mail spam messages. The lawsuits seek millions of dollars in punitive damages. Gartner research director Maurene Grey told the E-Commerce Times that Amazon would have had a lot to lose from a credi...

The battle over ownership of open-source Linux source code took a nasty turn as SCO, which claims to own a key part of the code and has aggressively pursued compensation for it, found itself the target of a hacker attack that took down its Web site. In a letter to open-source developers, Open Source...

PeopleSoft has amended its spate of lawsuits against would-be buyer Oracle to include new charges that Oracle deliberately interfered with its customer relationships. The move comes amid increasing doubt that Oracle can overcome two significant obstacles to its proposed takeover of PeopleSoft: regul...

SCO has announced that it will sell intellectual property licenses to make it legal for enterprises to run Linux, which allegedly uses portions of SCO's proprietary Unix source code. The company is offering an introductory license price of $699 per CPU until October 15, 2003, after which the price p...

Leading Linux vendor Red Hat has filed suit against The SCO Group, aiming to prove that Red Hat software does not infringe on SCO patents and to stop SCO from making what it called "untrue" statements. The company also announced plans to establish a $1 million legal defense fund to help smaller firm...

As a key deadline approaches, Oracle has extended its offer to buy shares of PeopleSoft stock for $19.50 in cash. According to PeopleSoft, the move reflects the fact that just 11 percent of its shareholders have agreed so far to take part in the hostile, $6.3 billion takeover bid. Oracle said its of...

A little over a year ago, an international consortium of four vendors announced they were pooling their talents and resources to create UnitedLinux -- a new, standardized flavor of the open-source Linux OS. However, UnitedLinux has not made many headlines since then, and SCO, one of the consortium m...

All eyes on Oracle's $6.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft have turned toward Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Department of Justice could crimp the hostile takeover attempt by raising regulatory concerns. Today is the deadline for the DOJ to issue a second request for information about implications of th...

PeopleSoft has commenced its offer to buy software maker J.D. Edwards, forging ahead with the $1.75 billion deal despite Oracle's best efforts to squash the merger. PeopleSoft is offering each J.D. Edwards shareholder $7.05 in cash, plus a fractional share of its own stock, in a deal that values J.D

Oracle has upped the ante in its hostile bid to take control of PeopleSoft, boosting its all-cash offer by 22 percent, or $1.2 billion. Oracle now says it will offer $19.50 per share for all outstanding shares of PeopleSoft stock, making the acquisition worth about $6.3 billion in total. "Oracle rem...

Microsoft has filed suit against 15 spammers in the United States and United Kingdom as part of a stepped-up campaign to stop the flood of junk e-mail. The lawsuits claim the 15 defendants sent some 2 billion unwanted and deceptive messages to members of Microsoft's MSN service and its Web-based Hot...