Legal Archive

In particular, Google:

• has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);
• made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-installed the Google Search app on their devices; and
• has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called "Android forks").

Google has been hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine by EU regulators for breaking antitrust laws. The European Commission says Google has abused its Android market dominance by bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also allegedly blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and "made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators" to exclusively bundle the Google Search app on handsets.

A controversial overhaul of the EU's copyright law that sparked a fierce debate between internet giants and content creators has been rejected.

The proposed rules would have put more responsibility on websites to check for copyright infringements, and forced platforms to pay for linking to news.

A California net neutrality bill that could have been the strictest such law in the country was dramatically scaled back yesterday after state lawmakers caved to demands from AT&T and cable lobbyists.

While the California Senate approved the bill with all of its core parts intact last month, a State Assembly committee's Democratic leadership yesterday removed key provisions.

"What happened today was outrageous," Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill author, said. "These hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only."

The U.S. Supreme Court freed states and local governments to start collecting billions of dollars in new sales taxes from online retailers, overturning a ruling that had made much of the internet a tax-free zone and put traditional retailers at a disadvantage.

News of the ruling caused shares of Internet retailers including Amazon.com Inc. and Wayfair Inc. to fall.

The court's 1992 decision involving catalog sales had shielded retailers from tax-collection duties if they didn’t have a physical presence in a state. Writing for the 5-4 court Thursday, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that ruling was obsolete in the e-commerce era.

On June 20, the European Parliament will set in motion a process that could force online platforms like Facebook, Reddit and even 4chan to censor their users' content before it ever gets online.

A proposed new European copyright law wants large websites to use "content recognition technologies" to scan for copyrighted videos, music, photos, text and code in a move that that could impact everyone from the open source software community to remixers, livestreamers and teenage meme creators.

Assembly programming can be intimidating for people who have never looked into it any deeper than a glance, but giving that it underpins how the computers we use work it can be helpful having context in regards to what is actually being run by the CPU.

Korean game developer PUBG, a subsidiary of Bluehole, has filed a copyright violation lawsuit against U.S.-based Epic Games, asking a court to determine whether the latter's "Fortnite" was copied from the former's "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds."

A PUBG official said Friday that the firm filed an injunction, alleging copyright infringement, with the Seoul Central District Court against Epic Games Korea.

Nineteen-ninety-eight changed the course of technology, which is to say that it changed the course of history. A nearly bankrupt relic of '80s tech nostalgia released a gumdrop-shaped PC called the iMac. An innovative search engine originally known as BackRub became a company with an even stranger name. A fast-growing online bookstore hatched a plan to start selling, well, everything.

In hindsight, these were tectonic shifts, but they hardly registered as tremors compared to the earthquake emanating from Washington, D.C. On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the most powerful tech company in America: Microsoft.

A federal district court judge on Wednesday ruled that President Trump can't block people from viewing his Twitter feed over their political views.

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said President Trump's Twitter account is a public forum and blocking people who reply to his tweets with differing opinions constitutes viewpoint discrimination, which violates the First Amendment.

In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.

Regulation (EU) 2016/6791, the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR'), regulates the processing by an individual, a company or an organisation of personal data relating to individuals in the EU.

It doesn't apply to the processing of personal data of deceased persons or of legal entities.

The rules don't apply to data processed by an individual for purely personal reasons or for activities carried out in one's home, provided there is no connection to a professional or commercial activity. When an individual uses personal data outside the personal sphere, for socio-cultural or financial activities, for example, then the data protection law has to be respected.

In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us to carefully review the publicly available court documents. All of the information we are sharing in this blog is drawn from those documents. We are sharing this information now and responding publicly because we believe both Microsoft’s role in the case and the facts themselves are being misrepresented.

Earlier this week Eric Lundgren was sentenced to 15 months in prison for selling what Microsoft claimed was "counterfeit software", but which was in fact only recovery CDs loaded with data anyone can download for free. The company has now put up a blog post setting "the facts" straight, though it's something of a limited set of those facts.

"We are sharing this information now and responding publicly because we believe both Microsoft's role in the case and the facts themselves are being misrepresented," the company wrote. But it carefully avoids the deliberate misconception about software that it promulgated in court.

The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into potential coordination by AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, according to six people with knowledge of the inquiry.

In February, the Justice Department issued demands to AT&T, Verizon and the G.S.M.A., a mobile industry standards-setting group, for information on potential collusion to thwart a technology known as eSIM, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential.

Google's use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle's copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Tuesday. The case - first filed in 2010 - was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. Oracle had been seeking $8.8 billion, though that number could grow. Google expressed disappointment and said it's considering its next steps in the case.

The dispute, which could have far-reaching implications for the entire software industry, has divided Silicon Valley for years between those who develop the code that makes software steps function and those who develop software programs and say their "fair use" of the code is an exception to copyright law.

"It's a momentous decision on the issue of fair use," lawyer Mark Schonfeld of Burns & Levinson in Boston, who's been following the case and isn't involved. "It is very, very important for the software industry. I think it's going to go to the Supreme Court because the Federal Circuit has made a very controversial decision."