lawsuit

The famous quote "there are no second acts in American lives" is attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to BrainyQuote.com, he also said, "his was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

The convoluted story of NTP and evolution of the American patent system is enough to drive a man to drink. Having beaten the literary metaphors well into the ground, let's ponder NTP's second act on the tech industry stage.

As you may have heard, NTP is once again feeling litigious. Last week it … Read more

This case could surely elicit some giggles from the rhyme police. Lulu.com said Wednesday that it has filed suit against Hulu.com for trademark infringement on the grounds that the two names and business models are too similar and will create confusion in the market.

Lulu.com, a service that lets members publish, print and sell their own books, has been around for five years, according to the company. Hulu.com is a joint digital video partnership between NBC Universal and News Corp., whose corporate entity N-F Newsite announced the name last week. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.… Read more

Microsoft has settled a long-running and expensive lawsuit with Eolas Technologies, a start-up backed by the University of California that alleged Internet Explorer infringed a patent.

"We're pleased to be able to reach an amicable resolution in this long-running dispute with Eolas and the University of California," the company said in a statement Thursday, but declined to share further details. Eolas couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

The suit concerned technology that lets Web browsers call up separate applications or plug-ins such as Flash or Java within a Web page. While at the University of California … Read more

I'm sure somebody out there loves William Lerach. Maybe he's got a cat or dog that likes to snuggle up on cold evenings. But this 61-year-old securities lawyer will be remembered as the lawyer Silicon Valley most detested, bar none.

Lerach became a media celebrity in the 1990s when he was filing a myriad of securities class action lawsuits. Tech companies, whose stocks were especially volatile during the go-go days during the Internet Bubble, were a favorite target.

So it was you can imagine the collective high fives going up all across the computer industry late Tuesday when … Read more

Last Friday, a judge found that making music available through a file-trading network does constitute copyright infringement, even if that music is ripped from a CD that you bought. (Here's a link to the PDF of the summary judgment.)

According to the Web site Recording Industry vs. The People, which is run by two lawyers representing some defendants in infringment cases brought by the RIAA, this is the second time a judge has made this point, although last time it was included only as a footnote.

Without this legal precedent, the RIAA would have a very hard time suing … Read more

Let's see how funny Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on the witness stand.

The two comedians are apparently being dragged into the copyright fight between their employer and Google. Entertainment conglomerate Viacom, the company behind Stewart's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google earlier in the year, alleging that Google and YouTube encourage users to pirate copyright material.

The two companies entered the names of people they each wish to depose in court, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last … Read more

Details in a MySpace user profile of a 31-year-old woman have been cited in a court case that centers on whether she lives in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

Kristin Galonsky claims she tripped and fell in March 2005 when leaving a comedy club in New Jersey owned by the Tropicana Casino and Resort and sued the casino in federal court in Philadelphia. She claims in legal documents to be a "citizen and resident" of Southampton, Penn., which is just across the Delaware River from New Jersey.

Tropicana has asked U.S. District Judge J. Curtis Joyner to transfer … Read more

Microsoft has won a reversal of a $1.5 billion jury verdict against it for infringing on a patent for MP3 technology held by Alcatel-Lucent.

Judge Rudi Brewster of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California tossed out the damages after finding that a jury improperly ruled that Microsoft infringed on one of two patents at issue for MP3 sound technology. The new ruling holds that one of the patents in the case was not actually owned outright by Lucent, and since Microsoft had a license to that particular patent through its co-owner, it's off … Read more

The first iPhone lawsuit might have been somewhat laughable, but the second one may be a little more serious.

An outfit called SP Technologies has sued Apple over the touch-screen keyboard at the heart of the iPhone, claiming Apple is infringing on a patent held by SP Technologies for a similar keyboard. AppleInsider dug up the SP patent filing from 2000, which claims the company developed a "method of providing a user interface for receiving information from a user using a user immutable graphical keyboard linked to an input area."

Patent suits, of course, are a dime a … Read more