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settlement posts

Filed under: News, AOL

AOL agrees to $3 million settlement over cancellation policy

Cancel AOLAlthough AOL has been rebranding itself as an online destination rather than an internet service provider, many people still think of AOL as the company that sent you a signup CD in the mail pretty much every day of the year. This blog's parent company hasn't just been aggressive in signing up new customers, but also in keeping old ones.

It turns out there's a price to pay for badgering or tricking customers into keeping a service they don't want anymore. And that price is about $3 million dollars. That's the amount AOL has agreed to pay in a class action suit settlement reached with 48 states.

AOL doesn't acknowledge any wrongdoing as part of the settlement. But the company has:
  • agreed to maintain an online system for processing cancellations
  • promised to issue refunds to anyone who can show that they were billed for services they had tried to cancel
  • pay $3 million to 48 states and Washington DC to cover the costs of the investigation

Filed under: News, Web services, Google

Google reaches settlement in Google News copyright case

Google NewsGoogle has reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse, one of the largest institutions still engaged in a legal battle with Google over the posting of headlines, news summaries, and images on the Google News website.

AFP and Google signed a licensing agreement today allowing Google to post AFP content. The wire service will withdraw its lawsuit, filed more than two years ago.

Details of the agreement are not public, but AFP CEO Pierre Louette says content on Google News would drive traffic to websites with AFP content, and would go further than just allowing Google News to use "headlines and snippets of text to provide just a taste of what an article offers."

[via search engine land]

Filed under: Internet

eDonkey shuts down, kills installed clients

eDonkeyToday MetaMachine, Inc. settled with the RIAA, agreeing to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright lawsuits from the recording industry. RIAA chairman and chief executive Mitch Bainwol said of the settlement, "With this new settlement, another domino falls, and we have further strengthened the footing of the legal marketplace." Along with the pay-out, MetaMachine has agreed to "take measures to prevent file-sharing by people using previously downloaded versions of the eDonkey software," which sounds like disabling the installed software remotely. The eDonkey web site has been taken down and replaced with a short message warning against illegal downloading with a distinct RIAA flavor ("Your IP address has been logged.") to it. The eDonkey network itself, of course, is decentralized and will live on as long as people keep using it, and given the popularity of eMule and other alternative clients, its vitality does not seem in jeopardy.

Filed under: Internet

BearShare bites the dust, settles with RIAA for $30 million

BearShareFree Peers, Inc., the company which produces popular file sharing software BearShare, has reached a $30 million settlement with RIAA and bowed out of the P2P business. The company will be selling all of its BearShare-related intellectual property, including source code, user information, and over 100 domain names, to iMesh, the P2P company that agreed to go "legit" after reached its own $4.1 million settlement with the RIAA two years ago. iMesh will continue to distribute BearShare on BearShare.com (though what changes are in store remain to be seen), and since it works with the Gnutella network, old versions of the software will continue to operate as they always have.

Filed under: Security

Sony settles in rootkit class action suit

Sony rootkit fiascoSony BMG has proposed a settlement in the class action lawsuit concerning the XCP rootkit that many of its music CDs were installing on users' computers without their permission. If passed, the settlement would have Sony recalling all XCP CDs and replace them with non-DRM CDs, plus ensuring that all XCP CDs are "promptly removed from the market" by offering owners incentives in the form of three free downloaded albums or $7.50 in cash. Sony will not be recalling CDs with MediaMax DRM, which also installs itself on consumers' computers without asking permission, but they're offering to give owners of those CDs DRM-free MP3s of the CDs' contents, plus free download of one album. I'd have loved to see this make it to court, but it was pretty much a given that it would end in a settlement. Hopefully, though, the rest of the record industry will take notice that consumers aren't kidding around anymore about invasive DRM.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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