Someone messed up big by failing to remove this amusing little bit of verbiage hidden away in a patent application (Eugene Volokh, Nov. 1).
Posts Tagged ‘tech through 2008’
YouTube.com sued by UTube.com
Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, an Ohio company, says its website utube.com gets more than 2 million erroneous clicks a month from persons who don’t realize how to spell the name of the hit shared-video site. “The lawsuit asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com domain name or reimburse Universal Tube for the cost of establishing a new corporate identity.” (Elinor Mills, CNet, Nov. 1; Matthew Sussman, BlogCritics, Nov. 1).
Jack Thompson: don’t you dare let gamers base characters on me
Jack Thompson, the Florida lawyer with a seldom-rivaled knack for keeping this site supplied with material (Oct. 20, etc., etc.), has fired off a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon demanding that it stop publication of the game because participants can use it to create characters based on him. A Slashdot posting explains that Thompson’s “image is not actually a selectable character in the game,” but John Scalzo at the Gaming Target website (scroll down) has published instructions on how to use the game’s build-a-fighter mode to create a character based on Thompson, widely loathed among hobbyists because of his courtroom assaults on popular games (among the character’s features: “puffed out self-important look… Banshee Scream. …no victory pose because, let’s face it, he’s never won”). More: XBoxic, GameShout, CNet/GameSpot (& welcome Ron Coleman readers).
“We’re Google. So Sue Us”
The company almost seems to base its business plan on stepping into legal trouble (Katie Hafner, New York Times, Oct. 19).
Patenting tax avoidance strategies
Notes New York Times columnist Floyd Norris: “Now you may face a patent infringement suit if you use a tax strategy someone else thought of first. …a federal appeals court ruled in 1998 that business methods can be patented, and since then the Patent Office has issued 49 tax-strategy patents, with many more pending.” Paul Caron has more (Oct. 20; Floyd Norris, “Patent law is getting tax crazy”, NYT/IHT, Oct. 19; Slashdot).
P.S. At Slashdot, commenter msobkow writes: “Patience. It’s a matter of time before the remains of SCO patent the use of patent lawsuits as a business model. The hope would be to get into a lawsuit over that patent, creating a potential infinite recursion and thereby an infinite revenue stream out of thin air.”
“EU to regulate video blogs?”
A new European Commission proposal would require Web sites and mobile phone services that feature video images to conform to standards set by that body, the Times of London reports. …
Shaun Woodward, the U.K. broadcasting minister, described the draft proposal as catastrophic, saying it could end up forcing someone to get a license to post videos of an amateur rugby team.
(CNet Blogma, Oct. 18). And here’s the Times Online:
Personal websites would have to be licensed as a “television-like service”.
Viviane Reding, the Media Commissioner, argues that the purpose is simply to set minimum standards on areas such as advertising, hate speech and the protection of children.
(Adam Sherwin, “Amateur ‘video bloggers’ under threat from EU broadcast rules”, Times Online, Oct. 17). However, there are some indications that the EU bureaucracy itself intends a less sweeping definition of the law’s application than that: Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica, Oct. 18.
Novel idea: don’t sue without actual harm
“A federal judge in Arkansas has thrown out a class action lawsuit against Acxiom, which exposed massive amounts of Americans’ personal information in a high-profile Internet security snafu three years ago. … Because the class action attorneys could not prove that anyone’s information had actually been misused, [U.S. District Judge William] Wilson dismissed the case and the request for damages on the grounds that any harm would be entirely speculative.” (Declan McCullagh, “Class action suit over ID theft tossed out”, CNet, Oct. 12).
Google and YouTube
Ingesting a gigantic litigation risk? (Lattman, Oct. 9; Althouse, Oct. 10; discussion at WSJ). More: Jul. 20, Oct. 2.
More: “Dick Parsons, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, fired a shot across the bows of Google, saying his group would pursue its copyright complaints against the video sharing site YouTube.com.” (Jane Martinson, “Google faces copyright fight over YouTube”, The Guardian (U.K.), Oct. 13).