intellectual property

An administrative law judge for the U.S. International Trade Commission has dismissed one of Nokia's nine patent infringement claims against HTC, patents blog Foss Patents reported today.

HTC argued that the patent, which deals with routing data to an app, is a standards-essential patent. ITC Administrative Law Judge Thomas B. Pender agreed, dismissing the one complaint.

Standards-essential patents are ones that companies must offer to other companies on a fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) basis. The idea is that fair licensing of intellectual property is needed for devices from different manufactures to work together properly. Most of the … Read more

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"

The report … Read more

An internal investigation into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's role in the felony prosecution of recently deceased tech activist Aaron Swartz should conclude "in a few weeks," the professor conducting it says.

The statement from Hal Abelson, a respected professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was published today in The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. The paper also published a letter (PDF) from MIT President Rafael Reif dated yesterday asking Abelson to review MIT's "involvement."

Swartz killed himself two years to the day after he was arrested on felony counts relating to connecting … Read more

Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, is taking issue with a description of how a discussion with one of his aides led the late Aaron Swartz to campaign against Hollywood-backed copyright bills.

At an event in San Francisco last weekend, Peter Eckersley, Swartz's former roommate and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director, told an audience that the late activist created the advocacy group Demand Progress after a fruitless meeting with one of Leahy's aides.

Aaron Cooper, who works for Leahy -- the author of the Protect IP Act -- as the chief intellectual property … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- A fruitless Capitol Hill meeting to discuss digital copyright legislation prompted the late activist Aaron Swartz to launch the Demand Progress advocacy group, his former roommate said at a gathering here last weekend.

Swartz was so frustrated with congressional willingness to break the Internet on Hollywood's behalf that he created a group to channel online outrage into political activism, said Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director.

Eckersley said Swartz had met with Aaron Cooper, who works for Protect IP author Patrick Leahy as the chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary … Read more

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more

A politically ambitious Justice Department official who oversaw the criminal case against Aaron Swartz has come under fire for alleged prosecutorial abuses that led the 26-year-old online activist to take his own life.

Carmen Ortiz, 57, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who was selected by President Obama, compared the online activist -- accused of downloading a large number of academic papers -- to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Last fall, her office slapped Swartz with 10 additional … Read more

Ahead of a meeting between Vice President Joseph Biden and video game makers, one of the trade organizations representing game developers put out a statement today saying it "does not seek to impede more scientific study about our members' products."

In a letter to Biden the International Game Developers Association's Daniel Greenberg wrote that the organization would "welcome more evidence-based research into the effects of our work to add to the large body of existing scientific literature that clearly shows no causal link between video game violence and real violence."

Greenberg also urged Biden to … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A new front opened Monday in the fight to own place-shifting devices when Sling Media, a subsidiary of EchoStar, filed a lawsuit against two of its rivals that accuses them of patent infringement.

Sling, maker of the Slingbox devices that allows users to watch and control their home television from anywhere, filed suit against competitors Belkin International and Monsoon Multimedia. Both are California companies that make devices that compete with the Slingbox at lower prices -- Belkin's @TV and Monsoon's Vulkano.

The announcement comes on the same day Dish Network, a key technology partner of EchoStar, announced an expanded version … Read more