This afternoon has been an interesting one for fans of Apple, Google, and Fortnite alike, as the three companies have become intermingled in a pair of lawsuits. Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, have now filed a lawsuit against Google for anticompetitive practices between Android and the Google Play Store.
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If you were a member of Google Plus before it shut down last year, odds are you got an email informing you that a class-action lawsuit against Google has been settled.
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From face recognition to fingerprints, biometric data is widely used in today’s consumer technology to sort through pictures, unlock phones, and more. Some states have passed privacy laws to govern usage, with the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in Illinois allowing individuals to seek damages. A lawsuit involving Google Photos was just dismissed in a win for the company.
One of Essential’s big bets with the Essential Phone and its upcoming products are modular accessories that work through a new wireless connector. A Silicon Valley company is now alleging (via Reuters) that the Andy Rubin startup stole trade secrets related to the connector without proper compensation.
After closing arguments wrapped up in the Google vs. Oracle case on Monday, the jury has come to a decision over the use of Java code in Android. Announced moments ago, the jury sided unanimously in Google’s favor.
For the most part, lawsuits involving Android OEMs have drastically died down since their peak in the early 2010s. A new lawsuit filed by Huawei against Samsung, however, alleges unlicensed use of cellular technology and software patents in smartphones.
Microsoft and Google have reached an agreement to stop complaining about each other to regulators. Speaking to Re/code, the companies have said they will attempt to work out any issues between themselves in the future, before getting regulators involved.
Google has won an appeal in what is now a decade-long legal dispute over whether the company violated copyright law when it scanned millions of books into its online database.
The original lawsuit was brought against Google by the Authors Guild in 2005 and claimed that Google had violated copyright law by allowing readers to view up to 20 pages of copyrighted books without purchasing them.
Google and Facebook have each been slapped with a R$50,000 fine ($16k USD) in Brazil for not removing or blocking morbid images. The move comes after pictures of a Brazilian musician in a mortuary made their way online. Christian Araujo, the artist in question, died alongside his girlfriend in a car crash last month.
The Guardian reports that Judge Denise Gondim de Mendonca declared both companies had acted in “bad faith” after ignoring an earlier ruling. In response to today’s news, Google had the following statement prepared:
The Marco Cilvil of the Internet (local law which regulates removals) requires that any court order for content removal specify the URLs to be removed. In parallel, we have already taken down many of the videos which have been flagged by users due to YouTube’s policies regarding offensive content.
Facebook is yet to comment officially on the ruling, but Google has stated that it will be appealing the decision. In an age where it’s so easy to share any kinds of images online, it brings in to question how much of this can be blamed on Google and how much is down to those who took the photographs or shot the videos to begin with.
Not to be too crude or disrespectful, but I couldn’t think of much worse than someone pulling out their smartphone to snap a picture of my dead body lying in a morgue. The fact the picture is posted online afterwards is more of a side effect, surely?
That’s not to downgrade the severity of the companies supposedly not taking action. As huge corporations, they too have a responsibility to ensure these kinds of images aren’t seen by anyone. It certainly brings in to question where the line should be drawn.
At long last, action is being taken against bloatware on Android devices. Samsung and Oppo are facing lawsuits over their use of pre-installed apps. Both companies are being sued by the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission, as revealed in a report by the Shanghai Daily. In a study of 20 phones, multiple devices were found to have apps which were not only pre-installed but also unremovable.
Reuters reports that the plaintiffs in an antitrust lawsuit against Google have finally withdrawn their case. The case, which was brought against Google nearly a year ago, accused the company of being anticompetitive with several of its Search and Android practices.
Google announced today that it has started rolling out an update to Google Wallet on Android with a couple of notable new features. First off, Wallet on Android now packs Google Maps integration. With this integration, you can see exactly where you performed any given transaction on an embedded map. This feature, Google says, will make it easier to notice any sort of suspicious activity that occurs.
Last May, Google was hit with an class-action anti-trust lawsuit over several of its Android and Search practices. The case centered around the idea that Google was forcing Android handset manufacturers to make its search engine the default on all their devices, as well as pre-load apps such as YouTube. These practices, in turn, drove up the price of Android devices. Reuters reports this evening, however, that a federal judge has dismissed the lawsuit due to a lack of evidence from the plaintiffs.
Update: According to Reuters, the settlement is $415 million, a big improvement over the previous $380 million offer.
Apple has reached a deal with its employees over do-not-hire policies that workers claim prevented them from getting higher-paying jobs at competing companies. Judge Lucy Koh previously rejected an offer to the tune of $324 million that the plaintiff in the case said was too low.
Today’s settlement is presumably for much more money than the original, since the plaintiff has accepted it, but the details of the deal have not yet been disclosed. Judge Koh said that the prior offer should have been closer to $380 million.
A photography and multimedia company by the name of Milk Studios filed a lawsuit against Samsung earlier this week, claiming the South Korean technology firm had violated its trademark with the name of its music streaming service. Filed in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York, the company says that Samsung “intentionally, willfully and knowingly” used the Milk name for its music service called Milk Music which launched last spring for Galaxy device users.
Google, according to a report out of Reuters, has agreed to settle all of its patent litigation with the Rockstar consortium, which consists of a variety of tech companies including Apple, Sony, BlackBerry and Microsoft. The Rockstar consortium paid $4.5 billion for Nortel Network Corporation’s huge patent portfolio in 2011, outbidding Google at the time. The Rockstar consortium originally sued Google and a handful of Android manufacturers in October of 2013, claiming that the companies infringed on seven Nortel patents.
Two sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth Turner are currently suing Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of the popular photo messaging app Snapchat. They’re claiming that when you perform a Google search for the term “Snapchat sluts” (definitely not safe for work) their pictures come up in the results. The sisters are also claiming that in 2011 Spiegel approached them in hopes of using their likeness to promote a new mobile application that he was developing called “Picaboo.”
Image via <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-01/tech-hubris-the-silicon-valley-antitrust-hiring-conspiracy#p2" target="_blank">Bloomberg</a>
A judge has rejected a settlement that was reached earlier this year between employees of Google, Intel, Apple, and Adobe and their respective companies, CNBC reported today. According to reports from the courtroom, Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the settlement was not high enough and should actually be $380 million.
The lawsuit was brought against the tech giants in question by current and former employees who believed (correctly) that their employers had created agreements to avoid attempting to hire engineers from one another. The idea was that if no competitors were making offers, each company was free to pay its employees whatever it wanted without having to worry about them jumping ship for a better offer.
The massive employee wage-fixing antitrust lawsuit between several Silicon Valley companies is only getting more interesting. An email exchange involving former Google CEO Eric Schmidt surfaced last week, shining light on Mountain View’s attempt to prevent Facebook from poaching its employees.
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Photo: Associated Press
According to a new report out of Re/code, Google will be joining forces with a variety of other tech companies to fight patent trolls. The Mountain View company will join Canon, SAP, Newegg, Dropbox, and Asana to ward off the trolls. Between the six of them, the companies hold more than 300,000 patent assets. The companies aren’t licensing their patents to one another, but rather joining the License on Transfer network. With this network, the companies promise to grant licenses to one another whenever one of their patents is sold, preventing it from being used against them by a troll.
Zoltan Szabadi, a former manager at Amazon Web Services, is being sued by the company after accepting a job on Google’s Cloud team. Amazon claim that by accepting the new role, Szabadi violated a non-compete clause in his employment contract. It will now be up to the courts to decide whether the broad terms of the original agreement actually hold up.
At Amazon, Szabadi was responsible for managing business partnerships with third parties. When he joined Google, he was specifically blocked (by Google, not Amazon) from reaching out to any of his former contacts within six months. Amazon said that wasn’t good enough, however, and filed a lawsuit last week.
Consumer rights group Hagens Berman has filed a new class-action lawsuit against Google alleging that the company’s rise to dominance in the search market was only driven by its inclusion as the default search option in Android, and that Google’s insistence that corporate Android licensees include the company’s first party software has artificially driven up the price of mobile phones.
To better explain exactly what the company is actually claiming, let’s break down a few quotes from the official press release on the lawsuit.
Samsung announced in a press release today that the South Korean company has signed an agreement with Google to mutually license one another’s existing patents as well as all patents filed over the next decade.
The agreement follows countless patent lawsuits between Samsung and Apple regarding hardware implementations of various cellular technologies as well as mobile software design and features.
“This agreement with Google is highly significant for the technology industry,” said Dr. Seungho Ahn, the Head of Samsung’s Intellectual Property Center. “Samsung and Google are showing the rest of the industry that there is more to gain from cooperating than engaging in unnecessary patent disputes.”
Since Google and Samsung don’t typically engage in patent battles with each other, the contract doesn’t seem poised to actually prevent many lawsuits. The move will likely prove to be more symbolic of the companies’ commitment to collaboration than an attempt to quell disputes.
Reuters reports that the CEOs of both Samsung and Apple have agreed to sit down with their lawyers and hash out a settlement in the latest of the never-ending patent suits between the two companies. Legal teams from both companies decided on this course of action earlier this week.
The meeting will take place some time next month, ahead of the actual court proceedings scheduled for March. If the two companies managed to reach a settlement, they could bypass the entire court process, saving both sides of the fight from financial and legal headaches.
