Ministry of Sound gives up P2P claims

Argentinian court calls Cuevana blocking request “broad and disproportionate”

An interesting case from Argentina. A judge has received and rejected a request from HBO Ole Partners, the Latin American branch of HBO, to block access to the popular streaming site Cuevana. In case you have not heard about it, Cuevana is an Argentinian streaming site that offers high-quality movies free of [...]

Patent troll sues Minecraft maker and other game developers

Habitual readers may have noticed that I am not a fan of software patents. From time to time one reads attempts to defend them in comments, blog posts, and with less frequency in scholarly articles, but as time goes by more evidence comes to light to demonstrate that they are damaging. Software patents [...]

Assassin’s Creed maker sued for copyright infringement

"I wonder if I can find a lawyer around here"

A science fiction author has sued games company Ubisoft for copyright infringement in its wildly popular game series Assassin’s Creed. The plaintiff, one Mr John L Beiswenger, is asking for either $1,050,000.00 USD for infringement, or up to $5 million USD for [...]

Lessons to be learned from the social media patent war

Some day someone will patent the sudo command

By now there is growing evidence that software patents do not benefit anyone. Really, software developers, software experts, venture capitalists, and industry insiders, everyone who is actually involved in producing software knows that software patents are a blight to the industry. The only ones who seem [...]

ECJ’s Advocate General favours interoperability in Europe

Long-time readers may remember the interesting case of SAS Institute v World Programming (my analysis here), an important software interoperability decision in the UK that got referred to the European Court of Justice. The case sets SAS, one of the biggest business software giants, against a UK software company that created a clone of SAS [...]

BitTorrent in patent dispute

BitTorrent Inc has been sued for patent infringement by a company named Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network. I usually suspect the presence of a patent troll when it seems impossible to find the website of the claimant in the patent dispute, and when most of the Google results for the company include the news of the [...]

Lodsys sues app developers

This is just a short update on what is happening with the Lodsys patent dispute. Lodsys filed a suit against 7 app developers in East Texas (what a surprise). The companies affected are 6 Apple and one Android: Combay, Iconfactory, Illusion Labs AB, Shovelmate, Quickoffice, Richard Shinderman, and Wulven Game Studios.The suit appears to be [...]

Judge rejects Google Book Settlement

I’ve been following with interest the ongoing saga of the Google Book Settlement. In 2005, Google was sued for copyright infringement by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild. In October 2008, Google settled the suit with the plaintiffs, and the agreement was subject to preliminary approval by a supervising [...]

Legalities of jailbreaking the PS3

Sony has been in the news recently quite a lot in the IP front. First, they have been served with a serious injunction in Europe regarding a patent dispute with electronics giant LG involving the PS3 (Jas Purewal at Gamer/Law and Florian Mueller have been following the issue). Then Sony got engaged in a DMCA [...]

Ministry of Sound gives up P2P claims

Last month we reported on an interesting development taking place in the copyright enforcement front. Law firm Gallant Macmillan requested a Norwich Pharmacal order (NPO) against BT in order to identify thousands of alleged copyright infringers of its music. Because of the ACS:Law email leak debacle, BT decided to fight the NPO, [...]