Editor’s note: Jay Kirsch is the President of AOL’s Business, Technology & Entertainment Group, which includes properties such as TechCrunch, Engadget, Autoblog, DailyFinance and Moviefone among others.
The church and state metaphor is used almost daily in the business of monetizing journalism. For the most part, when episodes like the CNET debacle happen, the damage to journalistic… → Read More
John P. Falcone over at CBS-owned CNET posted a quick piece on Aereo, the TV-over-Internet startup that is giving broadcasters fits. The story, which would have been a short piece on Aereo on a Roku device, is now awash with ridiculous disclaimers and discussions of lawsuits filed against Aereo by broadcasters. → Read More
Europe’s state railways continue to pick up steam in their lawsuits against Apple. Today, it emerged that Russian Railways has filed a trademark lawsuit against the iPhone maker, suing for 2 million roubles ($65,000). The reason is still not entirely clear: the public statement released by the RZD (Russian Railways’ abbreviation in Russian) only notes that the infringement relates to the RZD… → Read More
After we asked for clarification this morning, Oatmeal Studios has released a brief statement regarding their lawsuit against The Oatmeal and a chain of card and gift shops, Recycled Greetings, that published his cards. You can read a bit more about the lawsuit here. → Read More
Craigslist may have a peace sign as part of its logo, but the war over its data continues. As TechCrunch reported it would yesterday, 3Taps has today filed a countersuit against Craigslist in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, responding point by point to Craigslist’s allegations of copyright infringement and further levelling counter-accusations at Craigslist of… → Read More
The legal fight between mega-listings site Craigslist and third parties that have used its data in their own applications looks like it is taking on a new dimension this week. 3Taps, the company sued by Craigslist in July over 3Taps’ Craigslist data API, is planning to file a countersuit against Craigslist, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state… → Read More
The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman wrote an open letter to the lawyer who has been harassing him for most of two weeks, Charles Carreon. Carreon just sued Inman as well as the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. You can see some background here but this is all as crazy as it sounds.
I’ll avoid giving much context because Inman deserves a break and Carreon seems so oddly earnest… → Read More
It’s on now. Matthew Inman at the The Oatmeal has hired a crackerjack lawyer, Venkat Balasubramani, who sent a long and detailed letter to FunnyJunk essentially saying that their mothers should, in the end, have carnal relations with a bear.
The Oatmeal wrote a blog post complaining about his content being made available on FunnyJunk. There is no dispute that large quantities of his content… → Read More
TheOatmeal is a great web comic featuring funny birthday cards, wacky bear sex, and other merriment. It’s drawn by Matthew Inman and is great. Now, however, it’s the target of a decidedly odd – and funny – slander lawsuit.
Sadly the post is up and down right now but the gist is that Inman posted slanderous comments about FunnyJunk, a website dealing in funny junk. The letter begins: → Read More
So here’s a story that hopefully will be an eye-opener for entrepreneurs and startups, while providing a painful peek into trademark harassment and the importance of due diligence. It goes a little something like this: About two years ago, software engineer Brian Hamachek decided to build an app first on Windows Mobile (how some horror stories have been known to begin), then on Windows Phone, that… → Read More
You’d never think that the world of Nerf guns and dart shooters was so intense, but Hasbro apparently sued a blogger for leaking information about unreleased Nerf products he found on Chinese marketplace Taobao using the sweetest bait imaginable: free Nerf guns.
Urban Taggers is a blog about “assault blasters” for “kidults.” Essentially they cover Nerf guns and the like and are fairly popular… → Read More
For those who may have thought that last week’s patent lawsuit filed by Yahoo against Facebook was a one-off, here are some developments that indicate that we may be seeing more of this to come:
Facebook has now been sued by Mitel, an Ottawa, Canada-based enterprise IT company; and there is emerging evidence of others, including AOL, filing fresh patent applications to cover ever more aspects… → Read More
Barely two weeks ago, Erick was on hand at a news conference in which Barry Diller and company presented IAC’s latest media-tech investment — a startup called Aereo. Simply put, Aereo streams broadcast TV through the browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by “miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network,” as Erick wrote at the time. The cloud-based service… → Read More
The Megaupload troubles make for interesting discussion because there is much to be said on both sides. Whether the illegal aspects of the network “outweigh” the legal aspects is a question that will be discussed for months and perhaps years.
But one thing can’t be disputed: after the two-year investigation by the FBI, the site’s takedown was swift and perhaps over-thorough. Thousands and… → Read More
Armed with pitchforks and hindsight, class action lawyers are gathering up mobs of angry shareholders who lost money and going after the company. Earlier this week a lawsuit was filed against Netflix senior management for not disclosing the short-term nature of its contracts to stream certain movies. And this morning a shareholder rights group called Robbins Umeda announced an “investigation”… → Read More
Michael Robertson is no stranger to legal threats from the music industry. The founder of MP3.com fought a landmark case against Universal Music Group in the 1990s over digital music copyrights, which MP3.com ultimately lost. He was taken to court again by the music labels a couple years ago as the CEO of MP3Tunes, and now he is raising the ire of the radio industry with his latest startup, … → Read More
AT&T’s legal team probably didn’t have too restful a weekend. On Friday afternoon, the legal firm accidentally posted a partially redacted letter to the FCC revealing the original cost of its planned LTE build-out at $3.8 billion. That’s quite a difference from the $39 billion it would cost to achieve the same goal through a T-Mo acquisition, and many found the revelation incredibly… → Read More
Here’s something that totally baffles: In what way does Samsung’s Sidekick 4G violate Apple design patents? Have you ever seen anything close to a Sidekick get that half-eaten Apple branding? In any case, the plot has thickened between these two phone makers, with Apple now claiming that 12 different Samsung devices infringe upon Apple’s design and trade dress, including the aforementioned… → Read More
Limewire has agreed to pay $105 million to record labels, after a protracted court battle in which the record companies famously estimated Limewire’s damages could reach $75 trillion. So in a way, Mark Gorton and the venerable file-sharing company are getting off easy here. Isn’t it a tacit admission of how ridiculous their arguments were that they’re accepting a fraction of a… → Read More
Netflix, the Internet darling, has come under fire from various privacy advocates. The company has been the subject of five (!) separate lawsuits in the past two months, all of which center on some of its privacy policies. The lawsuit alleges that Netflix holds onto customer data like rental habits and credit card numbers long after people had cancelled their membership. → Read More
The legal dispute between Apple Corps and Apple Inc. for the rights to the Apple logo are far reaching. Since the first case back in 1978, Apple Inc. has slowly whittled away at Apple Corp’s initial legal settlement banning Apple Inc. from entering the music industry. It wasn’t until a 2007 settlement when most of Apple Corps’ trademarks were given to Apple Inc. thereby paving… → Read More
Motorola is suing TiVo over their infringing DVR technology, a move that is an attempt to head TiVo off at the pass after it sued Verizon over the same patents. The patents, which detail DVR technology, came from Imedia, a company that Motorola bought in the 1990s.
“TiVo is attempting to assert its patents against technology disclosed and claimed in Motorola Mobility’s patents, despite the fact… → Read More
We wrote about a blatant theft of IP a few weeks back. It was about the company Halfbot and their game Blocks Cometh and how their original flash game was stolen and put on the iTunes App store. After we (and many others) wrote about the theft, Apple took down game. Ars Technica followed up with the two-person development team. They tell their side of the horror story and discuss their options… → Read More
You may have seen one of these before. You see, this very popular lock can be found almost anywhere, and is easily broken into. Kaba-Ilco, the maker of the Simplex series lock, is being sued in a class action lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, the lock isn’t safe. → Read More
It used to be that when you thought of BitTorrent-related lawsuits you’d think of the RIAA, or maybe the MPAA. It may be time to update that line of thinking. TorrentFreak notes that we’re now approaching 100,000 copyright infringement lawsuits filed here in the US of A in the past 12 months alone. The thing is, it turns out that pornography studios are now where the RIAA was several years… → Read More
UFC has continued its fight against copyright infringement by filing a lawsuit against Justin.tv, the video streaming Web site where, UFC alleges, people can watch its events for free. UFC takes issue with “Justin.tv’s repeated and ongoing failure to meaningfully address the rampant and illegal uploading of video of live Pay-Per-View UFC events by members and users of the Justin.tv website.”… → Read More
Just a little update on the Sony/George Hotz lawsuit. You know, the one where Sony tries to put the cat back in the bag. Well it turns out that their reason for filing suit in California is that YouTube, Twitter, and Paypal are all based on California. Wait, what? → Read More
Ha! Well that didn’t take long. Sony has now officially sued the folks behind the PS3 hack, Geohot and fail0verflow. This is good news for Sony’s lawyers, and bad news for pretty much everyone else, particularly those of you who still believe the quaint notion of hardware ownership or anything like that. Foolish! → Read More
Polish site AppleMania.pl [Polish] is getting a cease and desist from good old Apple for potentially infringing on Apple’s delicate trademarks.
Use of the logo APPLEMANIA and Apple http://applemania.pl/ infringes on the exclusive rights of our Principal (Apple – ed.) Its trade marks, and an act of unfair competition. Namely, used by your character and logo APPLEMANIA “apples” clearly refers to… → Read More
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