You may have heard of Psystar, an infamous manufacturer of Mac clone "open computers." They're best known for frequently getting into legal hot water with Apple over everything from trademarks to copyrights to selling Apple's OS X operating on non-Apple computers. Apple just took Psystar to school on that last issue, winning summary judgment in a California court on copyright violations and Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violations.

Psystar's losing argument really splits some hairs, and the court wasn't buying it. Here's what happened: Psystar bought one copy of OS X and loaded it onto a Mac Mini. They then transferred it from the Mini to a non-Apple computer, where they modified the kernel so it would run on the computers they sell. Psystar argued that they were allowed to sell their (legally-purchased) copy of OS X, but the court recognized that the copies made from the Mini and the second, non-Apple machine weren't made legally. Advantage: Apple.

Judgment in Apple's favor means Psystar will likely have to pay damages at minimum. This could potentially sink their entire ship. The takeaway, according to an article on Groklaw? Don't mess around with licensing agreements, especially Apple's.

[via Slashdot]

A few months ago there was talk that a lawsuit could bring down the popular VoIP client Skype. That's because Skype was involved in a dispute with Joltid, a company that Skype was licensing technology from.

Today Skype announced that the company has reached a settlement with Joltid. The net result is that Skype now owns the technology and Joltid founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis will join the investor group that is in the process of buying Skype away from eBay as well as the Skype board.

If those names sound familiar, they should. Zennström and Friis were also the founders of Skype, back before eBay bought the company.

While there's a lot of backroom politics involved in the deal, here's what it means for users: Skype isn't going to close up shop anytime soon.

A marketing firm in Knoxville, TN, is suing its former client, a pizza place, over negative comments left on Facebook and Twitter. Even if this lawsuit weren't doomed to fail, and even if the marketers, Low and Tritt, had asked for less than an absurd 2 million dollars from The Pizza Kitchen, this would still be a terrible, useless bit of litigation. Without this lawsuit, I would never have heard of either of these businesses, and I certainly wouldn't have known about these supposedly libelous comments.

Without this lawsuit, you wouldn't be reading this post. If their goal was to avoid a negative image in the media, this marketing firm has failed on a grand scale. In fact, they could learn a thing or two from The Pizza Kitchen. Even though they only have one store, attracting this lawsuit has led to global media attention beyond anything Low and Tritt could have landed them when they were still a client.

After receiving a court order to stop selling Microsoft Word due to patent-infringing technology, Microsoft warned that the consequences could be dire if the injunction wasn't stayed. And by dire, I mean, Microsoft might have had to pull Word for a few months while writing new code to get around the problem.

Fortunately (for Microsoft at least, and anyone looking to pick up a copy of Office or Word in the next few months), it won't come to that. Today an appeals court stayed the injunction issued by a federal judge in Texas last month.

That doesn't mean that Microsoft is in the clear. It just means that the company can continue selling its software while the appeals process continues. If Microsoft ultimately loses the case, it's possible the company could still have to pull Word from the market indefinitely. But I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has a team of monkeys banging away at typewriters to come up with a less patent-infringing version of Word as we speak. That's how software is made, right?

Nevermind 2012, according to Micorosoft there's a good chance that a Texas district court judge's recent decision could very well cause civilization as we know it to crumble in a few short weeks.

It all starts with Microsoft's need to redesign Word to remove the code which violates i4i's XML patent. "The money! The beautiful, beautiful money!" an entirely fictitious spokesperson stated. "There's no way we could ever recoup it. It's not like we're a massively profitable company with overwhelming shares of operating system of office software markets or something."

But there's something much more horrifying to consider here than Microsoft losing a few million dollars. It's just the first domino to fall in the series.

Next comes the cataclysmic damage to vendors like Dell, HP, and Best Buy - all of whom would have to immediately re-tool as a result. That means hours and hours of meetings - which also means lost productivity and increased stress levels.

The associated disruption of sales in an uncertain economy? It's not hard to see where this could end up. Increased joblessness. The new unemployed would no doubt turn on the justice system, and lead to waves of rioting, looting, and lawlessness.

Before you know it, the United States is a desert wasteland and we're all driving around in school buses fighting off zombie attacks. After the US, the world quickly becomes a dull, withered husk.

So please - for the sake of humanity - grant the stay.

[via The Register]

A disagreement about the licensing terms for a key part of Skype's VoIP software has brought a legal battle that's threatening to shut the online phone service down. Don't panic yet if you're one of Skype's nearly 500 million users, though. The trial between Skype's parent company, eBay, and the company that produced the technology, Joltid, is not set for trial until June 2010.

Skype is working to develop its own version of the technology, so the Joltid license won't be necessary anymore. This is expensive and time-consuming, and eBay warns that it might not be successful. However, "Skype is confident of its legal position," so the sky isn't falling just yet. Interestingly, the reporting on this battle doesn't mention what part of Skype runs on the Joltid-licensed software, only quoting eBay as saying that Skype could not exist as is without the technology.

[via CNN]

When Amazon.com removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindles, there was a big uproar over possible censorship. The irony that the book in question happened to be the most famous literary screed on surveillance since - well, since ever - only added fuel to the fire. The resulting backlash caused Amazon to promise never to snatch customers' purchases off their Kindles again, even if another book has to be pulled from the store for legal reasons. The promise came too late for one high school senior, though, who lost his copy of 1984 AND the study notes he had made on the book.

Now the student is trying to start up a class action against Amazon, suing for messing up the annotations he (and, presumably, at least a few other people) made on their digital copies of 1984. Amazon didn't actually delete his notes, but removing the book means that the notes don't refer back to any text, and renders them useless. The suit alleges that nothing in Amazon's terms of service for the Kindle covers the removal of users' purchases -- the license is supposed to be for life.

[via Wall Street Journal]

If there's one type of software news that always brightens my day, it's news that a purveyor of crapware has lost a legal game of Rochambault. This time, it was Kaspersky snatching victory away from perennial nuisance Zango.

Zango has a history of rising from the grave like some horrible software zombie. Their other incarnations include HotBar and 180solutions, both of which are familiar to those of you who wrestle with malware on a regular basis. Want to read about what Zango does? You'll have to visit Wikipedia or some other site, because the Zango website itself is a "closed user community."

In the lawsuit, Zango claimed Kaspersky should be ordered to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and asked that the court "prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs."

Thankfully, the appellate court upheld an earlier ruling that granted Kaspersky "Good Samaratin immunity," and that they were free to classify Zango as adware and treat it as such.

This isn't the first time Zango has lost in court. Will it be the last? Doubtful. Zango probably still has a little money left to blow on spurious lawsuits, and there are plenty of other anti-malware developers they can bitch about.

Rapidshare is a service that makes it easy for users to upload and share files with a large number of people. It can come in handy whether you want to send a large file to a friend who has an email service with file attachment size limits or you want to share files with visitors to your website without paying a hefty web hosting bill.

But Rapidshare has never gained the respect that sites like YouSendIt have. YouSendIt provided a similar service, but it's aimed at sending files to just a handful of users. RapidShare, on the other hand, has become popular with users who upload copyrighted software, music, and movies. And today the company could be paying the price of allowing users to get away with those activities.

A German court is ordering Rapidshare to remove about 5,000 songs from its servers. The lawsuit was brought by GEMA, a group representing copyright holders. The court has ruled that Rapidshare must begin filtering content to prevent users from sharing any songs from artists covered by GEMA. The court estimates the value of those songs at about 24 million Euros (roughly $34 million).

Of course, it's pretty difficult to filter content on a site like Rapidshare, where users can easily ZIP files, change file names, or make other small changes to trick any filtering software that's put in place. I guess we'll have to see if Rapidshare ties to take any steps toward implementing content filters, and if the court decides that a good faith effort is good enough. Or maybe Rapidshare will just appeal the ruling.

[via TechCrunch]

I'm a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It's a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn't have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It's not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark's side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that's done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels' content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don't know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can't put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

Now that an initial guilty verdict has been handed down in the Pirate Bay case, there's a lot of talk going on about Google being "the next Pirate Bay." In an interview with Forbes, Harvard professor Ben Edelman states "Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done."

Wait, what?

Isn't that like implicating Superpages for the extras a client receives at a massage parlor provides if that's how he found the phone number? Google does not run a public torrent tracker. Sure, they may index torrent sites for search purposes, but I'm pretty sure that I can't tell uTorrent to create a new torrent file with Google as the primary tracker for it. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, acts as the sole tracker for some .torrent files. Without their tracker, no one would have access to such files. That's a massive difference.

I also can't open a torrent file directly on Google's site and start downloading it. Even if a direct link to the .torrent file does appear in Google's results, I'll still be redirected off-site to the actual source of the file to open it.

Eric Garland of torrent research group Big Champagne says "I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search." Right. It's the link on a search result page that causes lost revenue for the RIAA and MPAA, not the actual mp3 or avi files.

Besides, there are any number of ways to find files that don't involve search engines - forums, Twitter, Facebook. I can even call my friends and give them a truncated URL to a file if i want too. If it's access to the files and not the files themselves that are the problem, then these witch hunters will have to figure out some way to prevent any form of communication imaginable.

And heck, if Google can be blamed for their involvement the companies that develop web browsers next. After all, if we didn't have web browsers we wouldn't be able to search for torrent links on Google, would we?

The popular online music player SeeqPod, a service whose API powers a cluster of other music sites, has apparently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to documents linked by TechCrunch. There hasn't been any announcement that SeeqPod's service will stop operating, but the company is facing lawsuits from record labels that object to its ability to efficiently crawl the web to find Mp3s files from blogs and other sources. TechCrunch speculates that the bankruptcy filing is a reaction to the legal actions that are piling up against SeeqPod.

Download Squad is not in the legal business, obviously, but I'd speculate that SeeqPod would be eligible for protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because its mp3 crawling functions are entirely automated, but even if that's true, it's expensive for a startup to fight a protracted legal battle against big players like Warner Music and EMI. I love SeeqPod, and I'd love to see the service continue, especially as part of sites like Mixtape.me. Hopefully bankruptcy turns out to be the right move for SeeqPod's investor and its fans.

There's a lot to be said for having competent, well-informed legal representation at a high-profile trial.

You think that the plaintiffs in the the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay would have come into the case with a legal team better prepared to argue key points. For example, how torrent files work and why the tracker hosting them is complicit in the act of copyright violation.

That's what you would think, but the results so far speak to the contrary. It's only day two, and already half of the charges against the defendants have been dropped. It's good news for more than just Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Fredrik Neij. It's good news to anyone downloading torrent files.

In the days leading up to the trial, the Tribler P2P from Delft University revealed some eye-popping statistics. In a sampling of nearly 300,000 torrents, researchers found that almost half were tracked by Pirate Bay. If prosecutors were ever successful in shutting down their servers, several other servers could fail due to the increased load as torrents shift trackers.

Not a pretty picture, but at least it now looks like the peer-to-peer community will have some time to come up with a solution.

[ via TorrentFreak ]

For the last few years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken a rather aggressive stance on copyright protection by suing individuals who shared songs over the internet using file sharing software.

The Wall Street Journal reports that's all about to change. Well, somewhat anyway. After filing suits against 35,000 individuals the RIAA plans to give up on mass lawsuits. That doesn't mean it won't file any lawsuits against people who illegally upload and share music. But for the most part the group now plans to work with internet service providers instead. The goal is to hunt down customers who are violating copyright. Under the agreements, the ISP will give users a few warnings and then may terminate their accounts.

On the bright side, this means that ISPs don't have to fork over any personal data on customers. The RIAA can submit a list of IP addresses and the ISP can decide whether to go after the users based on that information.

It's not entirely clear whether the RIAA's efforts over the past 5 years have done more to alert people that file-sharing is against the law or to let them know that file sharing software exists and is a cool way to find free music. Now it's time to see if warning letters from ISPs do the trick. Considering how many people say they find internet access to be more valuable than sex, it just might.

There's no question that we all want computers that boot up and shut down more quickly. While a fresh install of Windows XP might boot as quickly as 30 seconds on some computers, the more applications you load onto your computer, the slower it will boot. Things get even worse with Windows Vista which loads about as quickly as paint dries. While Microsoft and other OS makers are working to cut boot times, if you're using a current generation operating system, odds are you spend at least a few minutes every day waiting for your computer to startup and shut down.

Now here's the big question of the day - if this is your work computer we're talking about, should you be paid for that time? Apparently employees at seveal companies including AT7T and Cigna have filed lawsuits alleging that they weren't paid for the time it took to turn their computers on and off each day, a process which they claim takes 15 to 30 minutes.

The employees say they should be paid for their time, because they're doing other work related activities while the computer loads, while employers argue that just as often, they aren't. But you know what? It's not like the employees are lying in bed sleeping at home. It's hardly their fault their bosses installed software that takes for-friggin-ever to boot. Not that I'm taking sides in this dispute.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

[via TaxProf Blog and Gizmodo]