Evolutionary Intelligence, LLC sued Apple, social media companies Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Groupon, and Living Social, telecom Sprint Nextel, and mobile advertising network Millennial Media in federal court yesterday, claiming infringement of 2 patents. Curiously, the names of the patents are virtually identical, although the abstract and specifics are different.…
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Here is a summary of legal developments in five federal and state court cases last week that involved technology companies, or alleged activities by their users. Samsung Cries Foul, Claiming Jury Foreman in Apple iPhone $1B+ Lawsuit Was Biased In a motion filed last Tuesday, Samsung's lawyers asked U.S. District Court…
In a Solomonic ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Manuel Mendez recently denied a defendants' sweeping Notice to Admit social media account postings by a personal injury plaintiff in Carr v. Bovis Lend Lease (read the decision below). In New York, unless a party objects to another's pre-trial Notice to Admit,…
Last week, Sprint filed several requests for the issuance of subpoenas in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The purpose of the subpoenas, according to the declarations accompanying them, is to reveal the identity of one who identifies him/herself as a 'mole' or insider in the…
In an outrageous misunderstanding of students' off-campus free speech rights, an Indiana school district expelled a high school senior just three months shy of his graduation for tweeting an F-bomb from home at 2:30 AM. Austin Carroll says that he sent the offending F-bomb tweet from home, from his own…
A new federal class action lawsuit (see below) charges that a host of well-known social media, app, and mobile device companies stole "literally billions of contacts" from users' personal address books by illegally 'harvesting' personal data on the sly, without their knowledge or consent. The 152-page complaint seeks monetary damages…
A Freedom of Information Act ('FOIA') lawsuit (below) by the Electronic Privacy Information Center ('EPIC') reveals that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid contractors to monitor Facebook, Twitter other social networks, blogs, and comments on news media websites. The documents (below) disclose that the federal government paid at least…
More lawyers are learning the hard way that courts will not grant social media discovery requests without first laying a foundation for access to the accounts and information being sought. A trial court judge on New York's Long Island recently granted two different motions to strike defense requests for social…
A juror who tweeted during a murder trial, and while he and his fellow jurors deliberated, led the Arkansas Supreme Court to reverse the conviction of a 26-year-old death row inmate. While there were other factors that led the court to send the case back for a new trial, the…