Samsung was hit with a patent infringement lawsuit yesterday over an emoticon patent (see below). Plaintiff Varia Holdings LLC charges that Samsung mobile phones violate its 2007 U.S. Patent (No. 7,167,731) for an "Emoticon Input Method and Apparatus." Varia Holdings took a jab at the electronics giant, charging that "Samsung…
Articles Posted in Intellectual Property
It's like a scene from the Wizard of Oz: Righthaven is almost dead as a corporate entity. Yesterday U.S. District Judge Philip Pro ordered "the transfer of all of Righthaven’s intellectual property and intangible property" — including 278 registered works filed with the U.S. Copyright Office — to court-appointed receiver…
The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit by plaintiff Paul Ceglia, the convicted felon claiming to own half of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, just ordered Google to divulge Ceglia's Gmail account data and logs by March 5, 2012 Ceglia’s email accounts are at the heart of this lawsuit. Some were known,…
Three GOP presidential candidates got slapped with a patent infringement suit yesterday (read it below) by a California partnership that holds a patent with social media implications for the candidates' Facebook pages. EveryMD, a California partnership, contends that one of its patents that enables individual Facebook members like Defendants Santorum,…
The U.S. Magistrate Judge overseeing Paul Ceglia's ownership claim case against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook ordered Ceglia to pay nearly $76,000 in attorneys' fees to Facebook's and Zuckerberg's lawyers for having to repeatedly go to court to compel Cegila to comply with the judge's earlier orders. That is in addition…
The Associated Press (AP) filed a copyright lawsuit in federal court this morning against the Meltwater Group over the company's Meltwater News product, charging that the competing site collects, stores, translates, and redistributes AP content to paid subscribers, but without paying the 165-year-old company a penny. Other online news aggregators…
Silicon Valley-based solar panel giant SunPower sued five former employees and competitor SolarCity today, contending that shortly before they left SunPower, the employees connected USB drives to the company's computer network, "and used them to steal tens-of-thousands of computer files" with confidential and non-confidential proprietary information. In addition to civil…
Any antitrust concerns about Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility were satisfied in Europe and the United States today. Regulatory hurdles were cleared when the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division each approved Google's purchase of the telecom unit. The deal bolsters Google's patent portfolio, and is…
Montblanc, the German maker of fabled fountain pens and other luxury goods sued Google for help in unmasking the identities of alleged counterfeiters running Google AdWords campaigns on Google's UK search engine to hawk knockoff pens. Montblanc's lawsuit against Google asks the court for equitable relief, i.e.,, not money but…
In pre-Super Bowl style, prosecutors charged a Michigan man with criminal copyright violations for allegedly operating nine (9) websites chock full of pirated sports broadcast videos (read the complaint below). Separately, federal agents also seized a purported $4.8 million in knock-off Super Bowl merchandise imported into the U.S. The U.S.…