Russian search and advertising firm Era Vodoleya has filed a lawsuit with the allegation that Google’s contextual advertisement is in violation of a 1998 copyright.
The suit alleges that Era Vodoleya invented contextual advertising in 1997 and later began using the patented technology in 1998. The suit also claims that Google’s implementation of the technology did not begin until 1999, which demonstrates clear and willful infringement.
Silicon Valley memory technologies firm RAMBUS has filed an injunction against NVIDIA with the US International Trade Commission containing allegations of copyright infringement.
The complaint claims that NVIDIA, in addition to 16 other companies, are violating 17 RAMBUS patents related to the memory controller which allows VRAM to communicate with other components of the GPU.
Rambus General Counsel Tom Lavelle indicated that NVIDIA and RAMBUS negotiated the current dispute for six years without resolution. “We believe this action is necessary given Nvidia’s continued willful infringement of our patents,” he said in press release last Thursday.
The US ITC is expected to determine if the filing is worth investigation within thirty days.
Back in November of 2007, it was announced that disc copying firm SlySoft had broken the BD+ DRM used to protect Blu-Ray discs. While the solution was not open source, it was nevertheless hailed as an important step in defeating a schema oftened considered draconian. Now, users of the well-known doom9.org community have broken the door wide open with a FOSS solution.
Yesterday the FCC convened to decide the future of so-called whitespace bandwidth. Referring to unused frequencies in the analog TV block, the FCC voted to approve the use of these frequencies which would blanket the US in freely-accessible bandwidth.
As of approximately 2:55 PM EST, the official John McCain website has been hacked. Clicking on the event details for McCain’s York, PA Road to Victory Rally reveals a banner announcing that McCain has quit the race and now backs presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Mousing over this banner redirects visitors to Obama’s website with a popup message calling for change.
A note from the editor: The content trapped behind the jump is potentially NSFW and does not represent the views of Icrontic, its editors, its owners, or even the author. People just like to read ridiculous talking points get run through the mud. Someone has to deliver the goods.
Rumors are flying that Legendary Pictures, the film company behind The Dark Knight, The Watchmen, and 300 may be in talks to buy Epic Games. Variety reports that negotiations have begun in North Carolina to discuss the details of the buyout.
The 2008 amendment to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 gave telecoms retroactive immunity from lawsuits related to assisting the government in its domestic wiretapping program. Since it was signed into law, there has been significant controversy over the constitutionality of the act which is said to deprive citizens of due process in cases where privacy has been violated. The EFF, long in agreement with this stance, recently filed a brief in the US District Court of San Francisco that hopes to challenge the legality of the FAA.
The EFF alleges that the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 is illegal because it permits the executive branch to reject lawsuits filed against telecoms for participating in the wiretapping program. It contends that this is a responsibility that should fall on the judicial branch, thereby respecting the constitutional notion of checks and balances.
Set to be heard on December 2, the Hepting vs. AT&T case is one of many the ACLU and EFF now oversee as coordinating stewards of the 47 outstanding wiretapping-related cases. If they should successfully prove their case, this will be a tremendous victory for both the rights and privacy of American people.
Either way, you’re a criminal.
Micron’s 9 October announcement that they would be scaling back Flash production and jobs seems pretty bizarre now that they’re going to throw $400 million at Inotera, the joint venture between Nanya and Qimonda.
Under the terms of the agreement, Micron’s stake in the company will grow to 36% of Inotera’s total trading volume. As governmental agencies and regulatory firms put the approval stamp on the deal, Qimonda will slowly ramp down its production and exit stage left. Under the Micron/Nanya joint ownership, Micron will gain access to roughly half of the 120,000 wafer per month manufacturing capacity at a significantly smaller price than they pay for fabrication now.
It is hoped that this maneuver will allow Micron to save significant money in the long term with a sizeable frontload of cash in the present.
Carnegie Mellon University research suggests that it would take a user 200 hours a year to read the EULAs of all software and sites they used. The loss of productivity equals roughly $360 billion.
In what can only be described as an exchange that keeps the market competitive, AMD and Intel have a comprehensive set of cross-licensing agreements. Amongst the most notable is AMD’s permission to use Intel’s x86 architecture and Intel’s permission to use AMD’s x86-64. Both patent suites, now a cornerstone of the CPU industry, are the basic building blocks for all of today’s major CPUs. However, in light of AMD’s Tuesday decision to spin off its fabrication arm into The Foundry Company, Intel is crying foul.
While The Foundry Company is currently beholden to AMD’s remaining engineering division, Intel suggests that it’s not enough to extend its agreements. Intel argues that The Foundry Company is no longer the AMD with which agreements are signed, but a new firm that must negotiate as one.
Intel’s claim is not entirely without merit given that the new foundry isn’t quite AMD any more. The Company is expected to pick up significant fabrication business of its own in addition to what obligations AMD might deliver.
In any regard, Intel is rattling its sabre and it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Spore has been highly anticipated since its announcement several years ago. The ability to design and evolve a creature from amoeba to sentience to space flight is attractive to simulation game fans everywhere. Since its release however, the game has received about 1800 customer reviews on Amazon, giving a rounded average of one out of five stars.
The poor reviews are mostly focused on the DRM that ships with the game, called SecuROM. SecuROM has been described as ‘legal spyware’ by its critics, and was widely derided when it was attached to another recent EA release, Mass Effect. In addition to SecuROM, EA has places a three install limit on the product key, another choice that is unpopular with tech savvy end-users.
Most of the single star ratings were seemingly written by users who would have bought the game, but chose not to, due to the DRM involved. Some of them even expresses a desire to pirate the game, rather than purchase it, due to the annoyance of the DRM.
Most popular video games receive only 300-500 customer reviews on Amazon over the life of the title, and very few have an average score lower than four stars.
The other day Cliff Harris, an independent developer of games such as Democracy 2, Kudos, and Starship Tycoon, asked an honest question on his blog: Why do you pirate my games?
He got a flood of earnest and insightful responses.
Answers ranged from “I’m poor and can’t afford games but I love them” to quasi-political rants about the philosophy of intellectual property. He also got some answers that gave him immediately actionable items to address, such as removing DRM from his games, lowering the price, and making his demos longer.
It’s a very interesting approach that makes one step back and say “Why don’t the big companies do that?”
Mr. Harris closed his report with an equally honest prediction of the effect his experiment has on the larger industry.
So it was all very worthwhile, for me. I don’t think the whole exercise will have much effect on the wider industry. Doubtless there will be more FPS games requiring mainframes to run them, more games with securom, games with no demos, or games with all glitz and no gameplay. I wish this wasn’t the case, and that the devs could listen more to their potential customers, and that the pirates could listen more to the devs rather than abusing them. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
One bold software dev asked why people pirate. They responded in droves, and he listened. Shock.
