Hasta La Gadget!

The patent wars between tech giants has been heating up over the years, with companies using patents and legal victories as a means to block the sale of devices by their competitors. So far the biggest one we’ve seen is Apple versus Samsung, but it looks like that war will pale in comparison to the upcoming one where a consortium has filed a lawsuit against Google, ASUS, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE, claiming that they have infringed upon patents owned by them. The consortium is none other than Rockstar which is owned jointly by the likes of Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony. The consortium owns thousands of patents which were bought when Nortel filed for bankruptcy, so safe to say they have a lot of weapons in their combined arsenal.

According to the lawsuit, Rockstar claims Google infringed upon seven of Nortel’s patents, while other companies, such as Samsung, HTC, and LG, were accused to infringing upon seven patents related to graphical user interfaces, messaging, notifications, and other mobile-related functions. According to Rockstar’s CEO, John Vesci (via Wired), “Pretty much anybody out there is infringing […] It would be hard for me to envision that there are high-tech companies out there that don’t use some of the patents in our portfolio.” While other companies listed as having infringed upon the patents have yet to respond, a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying, “While we haven’t yet been served with this complaint, we continue to advocate for patent reform that would address the current flood of patent litigation.”

Tech Consortium Sues Google And Other Tech Companies For Alleged Patent Infringement original content from Ubergizmo.

Not only is HTC having recent financial difficulties, but it looks like they will be facing some legal difficulties too as Nokia has won a legal victory over HTC over in the UK where a judge has found that HTC had infringed upon one of Nokia’s European patents. The patent in question is for a “Modulator structure for a transmitter and a mobile station” and with this legal victory, Nokia is now pushing for a sales injunction against HTC and its offending devices, and will also be seeking damages for HTC’s unauthorized used of their patents. “Nokia will now seek an injunction against the import and sale of infringing HTC products in the UK as well as financial compensation.”

Naturally HTC will be appealing to the courts against this decision, but for now it looks like Nokia is in the lead. Nokia has had several legal contestations with other tech giants in the past, such as Apple, although the scale of their legal battle is probably nowhere as near or as “epic” as Apple and Samsung. It is unclear as to which are the products by HTC that have infringed upon Nokia’s patents, but unless they are the HTC One and the newly launched HTC One Max, we reckon HTC shouldn’t be affected too greatly. We will keep an eye out for further development and see how HTC’s appeal goes.

Nokia To Seek Injunction Against HTC In The UK Following Court’s Ruling original content from Ubergizmo.

Apple has recently been hit with a class-action lawsuit in which a man from Idaho claims that Apple had long knew about problems with the 27” iMac display, but did nothing to correct it, resulting in him purchasing the device only to have it fail on him 18 months later. When he took it in for repair, he found that it would cost him a whopping $500 and while it is not under warranty, presumably what incensed the man was how he found that there was a 300-page thread on the AppleCare support problems detailing the issue, but nothing has been done about it yet.

The man is seeking $5 million in damages in which hopefully it will be able to cover all iMac users between 2009 to 2012 who might have been affected by the problem and had to fork out money to repair it, despite Apple’s knowledge of the matter. According to the complaint, “Despite numerous complaints … Apple has refused to publicly acknowledged the screen-dimming effect […] and [it] has failed to stand behind its representations and products and offer a fix for impacted consumers.” For those unfamiliar with the problem, it seems that there is a chance an iMac display from 2009 to 2012 might fail in the sense that half of the display would go dim for no reason apart from possible hardware failure. Apple has yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Man Files Class-Action Lawsuit Against Apple Over Failing 27″ iMac Displays original content from Ubergizmo.

So the other day we reported that Blizzard had won a legal case against bot maker, Ceiling Fan Software where the courts ordered the company to cease all activity and to pay Blizzard $7 million in damages. $7 million is a lot of money and is definitely not something to sneeze at, but it seems that Ceiling Fan Software might not have that much money lying around and has instead turn to asking their users and fans for donations to help pay their legal fees. In a statement released on its website, “If you would like to make donations to help offset some of our outstanding legal fees, you may do so here,” along with directing users to a PayPal link.

That particular portion in the statement has since been removed, presumably due to the backlash that they received. There were some who felt that it was absurd that they were asking for donations after engaging in an illegal activity that was clearly banned by Blizzard’s TOS. The rest of their statement reads, “After more than 2 years of legal battles with Blizzard Entertainment to both pursue our right to operate and our customer’s right to play WoW as they choose, we did not prevail in the suit and have been ordered by the United States District Court in California to cease our operations.“ What do you guys think? Was it right for them to ask for donations to help offset the cost of their legal fees? Or do you believe in the saying, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

WoW Bot Maker Asks For Donations After Being Hit With $7m In Damages original content from Ubergizmo.

Given that piracy of movies, games, software, and music have become the norm, sometimes we download illegal content without thinking too much of it. Granted there have been cases where people have been arrested and slapped with massive fines, but those are pretty rare giving us a sense of “safety”. Well the bad news is that if you’re the type that loves to pirate often and actually hang out in forums and chatrooms dedicated to the practice, you might want to think twice as the owner of UploaderTalk has revealed that his entire website was merely a front that was used to gather information about the people using it. (more…)

Pirate Website Uploader Talk Turns Out To Be A Front For Gathering Data On Pirates original content from Ubergizmo.