Hasta La Gadget!

Psystar to shut down ‘immediately,’ world shrugs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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And it’s all over, folks: The US District Court for the Northern District of California has just permanently forbidden wannbe Mac cloner Psystar from selling modified versions of OS X, providing any tools that enable users to bypass the OS X kernel encryption, and / or intentionally aiding anyone else from infringing Apple’s OS X copyrights in any way. We knew this was coming following Apple’s decisive victory against Psystar last month — the only open questions were whether the court would include Snow Leopard and Psytar’s Rebel EFI software in the ban, since the lawsuit was specifically about Leopard and Rebel EFI wasn’t the subject of any proceedings. Both issues were predictably resolved in favor of Apple: the court specifically included Snow Leopard and any future versions of OS X in the scope of the injunction, and while Judge Alsup couldn’t address Rebel EFI directly, he did expressly forbid Psystar from “manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking” in anything that circumvents Apple’s OS X hardware locks — which we’d say covers Rebel EFI’s functionality pretty thoroughly. Psystar has until December 31 to comply, and the Judge Alsup isn’t kidding around: “Defendant must immediately begin this process, and take the quickest path to compliance; thus, if compliance can be achieved within one hour after this order is filed, defendant shall reasonably see it done.” Psystar can still appeal, obviously, but it’s already got its own hefty legal bills and a $2.67m fine to pay to Apple, so we’ve got a feeling this one might have reached the end of the line.

P.S.- Amusingly, Judge Alsup appears to be pretty sick of Apple’s shenanigans as well: in the section discussing Snow Leopard, he says Apple first tried to block any discovery of Snow Leopard before the OS was released, and then pushed to include the software in the case after it launched. That’s why the Florida case over Snow Leopard wasn’t merged into this case — Alsup thought it was a “slick tactic” that “smacked of trying to ‘have it both ways,’ and offended [his] sense of fair play.” Ouch.

Psystar banned from copying any version of OS X, helping others install it originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So much for making nice. Apple just announced that it’s countersuing Nokia for infringing thirteen of its patents — slightly upping Nokia’s claim that Apple’s infringing ten. We haven’t seen the case yet, but we’ll post it up for you as soon as we find it — and as we predicted in our breakdown of Nokia’s complaint, this is shaping up to be a long and costly nightmare of a suit. Hey, do you think Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell might have a crazy lightning rod of a statement about the case for us?

“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president.

Cool, thanks. We’ll be in the corner under a Nomex blanket for the next few months.

Update: Here’s the PDF of the reply — we’re still reading all 79 pages of it, but it’s what we expected: Apple says Nokia’s patents aren’t actually essential to GSM / UMTS, denies infringing them, and says they’re invalid and / or unenforceable anyway. Apple also says Nokia wanted unreasonable license terms for the patents, including a cross-license for Apple’s various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn’t willing to do. That’s in stark contrast to what Nokia says it wants in its lawsuit — all it’s asked the court for is past due license fees on its patents. (Which is odd, if you think about it: Nokia wouldn’t come to terms on a license that didn’t include iPhone patents, but it’ll spend the cash on litigation for past due fees? That seems silly.) Oh, and if you’re just in this for the bitchy quotes, here you go:

As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, stated at Nokia’s GoPlay event in 2007 when asked about the similarities of Nokia’s new offerings to the already released iPhone:”[i]f there is something good in the world, we copy with pride.” True to this quote, Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple’s iPhone ideas as well as Apple’s basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia’s purported standards essential patent.

We’ll let you know if we see anything else of interest, but we’d say we’re in for a long, bumpy ride here.

Apple countersues Nokia for infringing 13 patents originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The strange saga of the CrunchPad is getting even stranger: although Fusion Garage has a press conference scheduled for Monday, the company’s apparently been hinting to some members of the press that the split with Michael Arrington was no surprise, and that TechCrunch didn’t actually contribute anything of value to the CrunchPad. As you’d expect, that’s got Arrington on the warpath. In a post titled “CrunchPad Litigation Imminent,” he offers up an email from Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan and two letters dispatched from his lawyers to both Fusion Garage and would-be CrunchPad ODM Pegatron that paint a much different picture: Chandra calls the split “out of the blue,” Pegatron won’t produce anything without TechCrunch’s “explicit approval,” and there was apparently even talk of merger between Fusion Garage and Arrington’s CrunchPad, Inc. That certainly puts the timeline into dispute, but Mike’s various CrunchPad intellectual property claims are far less solid, and unexpectedly weak — even if you completely accept Arrington’s side of the story, his CrunchPad dealings don’t reflect his reputation as a bulldog Silicon Valley attorney. Let’s break ’em down:

• Arrington claims he’s the “outright owner of the CrunchPad trademark,” but that’s simply not true: the CrunchPad trademark was only applied for on November 17, the same day Arrington says Fusion Garage notified him of the split. Oops — and even stranger because Arrington’s said the CrunchPad was due to be launched on November 20. Why wasn’t this sewn up months ago?
• Assuming there isn’t some secret CrunchPad patent application we don’t know about, the only major IP rights we can see TechCrunch asserting to the CrunchPad device have to do with the copyright to the code , and that’s a total mess. Since Arrington apparently didn’t draw up a contract giving him sole copyright to the CrunchPad’s code, he and his lawyers are arguing that TechCrunch and Fusion Garage are “joint owners” to any rights, and that’s just about the weakest position Arrington can be in. Joint copyright owners are legally considered to have equal rights to the entire product, and unless there’s a written agreement (see how that keeps coming up?) saying they both have to sign off, each joint owner is allowed to non-exclusively sell the entire thing without the other’s approval. In our experience it’s pretty rare for joint copyright ownership to be an ideal business arrangement, and we can’t imagine how Arrington got to within three days of launching the CrunchPad without hammering out the details of who owned what.
• In fact, the most notable thing about the letter from Arrington’s lawyers to Fusion Garage is that it doesn’t contain any contractual language whatsoever — it only references emails and conversations between the two companies. That’s particularly odd because the letter to Pegatron says TechCrunch will be suing for breach of contract, so you’d think Arrington’s attorneys would be laser-focused on his contractual rights if he could assert them. Then again, you’d think Arrington would have known better than to start this project without doing the appropriate paperwork first, so really anything’s possible.

Now, we could be totally wrong about all of this: we haven’t heard anything directly from Fusion Garage, and there very well could be contracts we haven’t seen. But for right now, we’re absolutely mystified as to how Michael Arrington — who, again, is an attorney — found himself in this position, and we’re still mildly convinced this is all some kind of stunt. We’re sure there’s more drama to come, stay tuned.

Michael Arrington says CrunchPad litigation is ‘imminent,’ provides more details — but where’s the contract? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well well, maybe we can all get along after all: AT&T and Verizon just dropped their various advertising-related lawsuits against each other. We can’t say we’re surprised, considering AT&T lost its request to have Verizon’s ads pulled down for the holidays — spending money to litigate this further would have simply been a waste, and generated even more bad PR. Now let’s just hope these two suck it up and battle it out over service quality and pricing, like they should have been doing all along. Or AT&T can just make some more nonsensical Luke Wilson commercials, whatevs.

Update: Whoa, so this is crazy. We just checked out the other suit that was dismissed, and it turns out that Verizon actually sued AT&T back in July, but not for any damages — instead, Big Red asked the court to rule that its various “Most Reliable 3G Network” taglines were actually true. That wackiness certainly explains why AT&T felt the need to push back, we suppose, and it makes Verizon’s current whining over Sprint’s “Most Dependable 3G Network” claims part of a larger, lamer pattern. We’ve included a shot of the case after the break, check it out.

Continue reading AT&T and Verizon drop lawsuits, make nice for the holidays

AT&T and Verizon drop lawsuits, make nice for the holidays originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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