Now, Google is hardly alone in abusing patents, but a German high court’s ruling against Motorola shows that Google is just adding to the list of its monopoly abuses by playing the patent abuser game. The ruling stemmed from Google demanding that companies either pay an absurdly high patent license fee — in this case [...]
Google dominates Internet advertising, with 44.1% of the $113 billion per year global online advertising market, but it’s quietly gunning for control of the even larger television advertising sector. As Robert Kyncl, a senior manager at Google’s YouTube operation said in a recent New Yorker interview that “this industry [i.e. TV] is worth three hundred [...]
In launching ts iBooks Author program for creating interactive textbooks and other books, Apple has also created what Ed Bott at ZDNet calls “Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement.” How bad is it? Well, any book created by the software can be sold by Apple– and only by Apple. It’s like a company buying [...]
Well, Congress passed a stupid law allowing previously public domain works to be withdrawn and put back under copyright, all to comply with global trade agreements pushed by multinational corporate interests. Now, I hate restricting the public domain and think most trade agreements these days are corporate giveaways. But I really never bought the likelihood [...]
Ars Technica/Wired magazine have taken great interest in the rise and now fall of copyright troll Righthaven, which used abusive lawsuits to shake down websites for payouts only to see judges start rejecting their claims. Now, they are taken great joy in a report that a defendant has moved to dismantle copyright troll Righthaven: one [...]
Ars Technica has a nice article outlining how to check out books from public libraries using Amazon’s new support for such services. It was possible in the past to use library e-books on a Kindle, but it was a bit clunky. The key to the new service is that you can check the book out [...]
There has always been an uneasy tension between the Copyright Clause of the Constitution and the First Amendment. Regulating copyrights often looks like regulating speech, although the courts have generally allowed traditional copyrighted works to escape First Amendment concerns. But what happens when Congress takes works that have fallen into the public domain and been [...]
The Hill reports that an online petition proposes ending software patents: A petition on the White House’s website to end software patents has passed the number of signatures required to receive an official White House response. The petition argues that patents have become “a way to stifle innovation and prevent competition rather than supporting innovation [...]
