Tech Law

The FCC last week issued citations to two service providers for delivering unauthorized robocalls to millions of wireless phones. The companies that received the citations are the Dialing Services and Richard Gilmore's Democratic Dialing. The calls were made on behalf of an assortment of clients: bu...

The most significant change to U.S. patent law since 1836 -- or perhaps 1790 -- is being implemented on March 16, 2013. Part of the America Invents Act of 2011, it concerns the doctrine of first-to-invent, laws concerning the protection of original inventors, regardless of whether they were the firs...

The Federal Trade Commission released its updated Dot Com Disclosures guidance on Tuesday, emphasizing the requirements for advertisers targeting mobile devices. In short, the rules that apply to ads in newspapers, radio and television also apply to mobile devices and social media. The update is th...

Google has settled its Street View privacy case with 38 states and the District of Columbia. As part of the settlement, the company will destroy the personal information it collected under the project, train its employees on privacy issues for a 10-year period, launch a campaign to educate consumers...

There are more than 6 billion mobile devices in the world. As of last July, there were more than 321 million wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. alone. Of course, it is impossible that 101 percent of U.S. residents have wireless connections, so that means many of us have multiple subscriptio...

The T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger has moved one step closer to the finish line now that the Department of Justice has signaled it doesn't oppose the deal. The department allowed a required waiting period to pass without objection, Deutsche Telekom said Wednesday, bringing the deal to an "important stagin...

Microsoft was just handed -- and has accepted -- a fine by the European Union for failing to offer users a choice of browsers on its Windows 7 operating system, despite a legally binding commitment. As part of a 2009 settlement with the EU following a competition investigation, Microsoft introduced ...

The White House agreed Monday with consumers who want to be able to legally unlock their mobile phones and tablets and move them to the carrier of their choice. The Obama administration's statement was in response to a petition on the White House's We The People forum that disagreed with the Library...

Kim Dotcom experienced a legal setback late last week when the New Zealand Court of Appeal overturned a lower court ruling that had required the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to disclose all of its evidence against him. However, his fight to avoid extradition is nowhere near closure. Nor has ...

Google and other aggregators won a partial victory Friday in the lower house of the German parliament, where lawmakers approved legislation that would allow publishers to protect their digital copyrights by charging to fully reproducing their content. Questions remain about whether other countries -...

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh on Friday struck more than $450 million from the damages a jury awarded to Apple in last summer's blockbuster verdict against Samsung. The jury found that Samsung had willfully copied a number of Apple's design and software patents for the iPhone and ruled that it should...

The Center for Copyright Information is ready to start implementing the Copyright Alert System, it said Monday. Under the system, content partners, such as music and movie producers, will alert participating ISPs of alleged P2P copyright infringement by their customers. The ISPs will then forward th...

At the oral argument in Bowman v. Monsanto, Chief Justice Roberts cut off Bowman's attorney seconds into his delivery, questioning his thesis, which undermined the purposes of patent law. "Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one...

The Federal Trade Commission last week reached a settlement with HTC America over charges the company failed to take reasonable steps to secure the software in its smartphones and tablet computers. The security flaws could have compromised the privacy of millions of consumers, the agency said. This ...

Oracle is not letting go of its Java patent infringement beef against Google despite its sound drubbing last spring when U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that programming APIs were not subject to copyright protection. Last week, Oracle took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the ...