Conventional wisdom has it that if you want to sell a tablet or smartphone Apple will probably sue you. It’s a dirty game of the world’s most valuable company trying to control the market for a device that is almost entirely composed of prior art invented elsewhere that no one owns the right to.
Most often hit by Apple’s copyright trolls are second tier Android device makers that can’t afford lengthy battles. It’s a way to block Google’s business without directly doing battle with a company that can afford to defend itself. In a new turn of events, HTC has decided to sue back, using Google held patents.
HTC employed nine patents that originally came from Palm, Motorola, and Openwave Systems, which Google bought within the past year, Bloomberg said, citing U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records. Google transferred the patents to HTC on September 1.
The latest lawsuit marks Google’s strongest show of support for its Android partners. Apple has levied multiple lawsuits against Android supporters including HTC, Motorola Mobility, and Samsung Electronics in a bid to halt their momentum in the increasingly cutthroat smartphone market.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20102903-94/htc-sues-apple-using-google-patents-report-says/#ixzz1XKTHDnMF
Talks in Philadelphia and New York stalled after Verizon demanded more than 100 concessions from workers regarding health care, pensions and work rules, said the Communications Workers of America.CWA workers picketed at Verizon headquarters in New York City, some holding signs that read: ‘CWA on strike for middle-class jobs.’
Verizon has reportedly demanded more than 100 concessions from workers regarding health care, pensions and work rulesVerizon has reportedly demanded more than 100 concessions from workers regarding health care, pensions and work rules
Mark C. Reed, Verizon’s executive VP of human resources, called the outcome of the unions’ actions ‘regrettable’ for customers and employees.
Reed said: ‘We will continue to do our part to reach a new contract that reflects today’s economic realities in our wireline business and addresses the needs of all parties.’
Workers affected by the expired contract include 10,000 under the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who serve as phone and repair technicians, customer service representatives, operators and more.
Contract negotiations began on June 22.
‘Even at the 11th hour, as contracts were set to expire, Verizon continued to seek to strip away 50 years of collective bargaining gains for middle-class workers and their families,’ CWA said in a statement.
This is the old Bell Atlantic.NYNEX side of the house that is walking. So it is principally focused in the NE Bosh-Wash corridor. Management has already called in staff from other parts of the country to fill these positions.
In this economy, I really don’t know if it would be wise to strike right about now. Especially since we maybe facing a double dip.
Bernice Keebler had a simple complaint: Verizon billed her $4.19 for six “local calls” but wouldn’t tell her where she’d called – not unless she got a lawyer and a subpoena.To Keebler, that stretched the bounds of fair dealing beyond the breaking point. “I think I have the right to know what I am paying for,” she told me in a column about her case last month. Keebler likened the experience to getting a tab at a restaurant with a bottom line for “food,” but no details to review or question.
A Public Utility Commission judge agreed. In a decision released today by the PUC’s communications office, Administrative Law Judge Mary D. Long proposed fining Verizon Pennsylvania $1,000 for failing in its duty to provide “adequate customer service”:
It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon’s witness could offer that a charge like Mrs. Keebler’s $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon’s computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.
This is what I classify as corporate bullying of a customer. They don’t want to be bothered so they pull the `get a lawyer` schtick figuring the costs of legal counsil would be a deterrent to the inquiry.
This time VZ figured wrong.
Using and abusing the courts isn’t new at Microsoft. More often than not, Microsoft’s legal trolling never gets as far as a courtroom. When you have an army of lawyers on staff and very deep pockets, most of your potential court rivals would rather bed to your will than risk being bankrupted by endless litigation. Microsoft has used this ploy to squash competition and even to force business and consumers to pay for products and services they didn’t really want (when did you last have the option of buying a new PC without Windows?).
The latest target of the Microsoft shake down squad in Android. After all, not having a viable mobile platform of its own doesn’t mean Microsoft can’t impose its tax on mobile devices, right? Plus, if a manufacturer pays Microsoft $15 per Android device, then paying $14 for a Windows phone license seems more reasonable. The open source phone / mobile Android OS is actually a Google property, but there are no quick bucks to be shaken from Searchzilla’s pockets. Google has the resources to do endless battle with Microsoft, and I suspect its management may even take pleasure in a lengthy legal war. That makes suing Google a no win. But savvy Microsoft execs know that there are abundant manufacturers building devices that use Android and a great many are small, with limited resources. If you read the list of potential litigants carefully, it’s pretty easy to conclude they were carefully chosen for their inability to survive prolonged litigation. For that reason, most are paying so called royalties (aka protection money) to Microsoft.
A big part of what is wrong with American today is that the corporate legal department has become a profit center. That trend has been aided by a government run by lawyers who have turned the patent and copyright acts into the exclusive domain of trolls and a select few special interests. While we have seen new and innovative ways to twist the application of intellectual property laws, we have nearly ended the sort innovation that made us the world technology leader. Funny thing, wasn’t Bill Gates’ favorite meme that Microsoft needed to be free to innovate?
Here’s a new twist to AT&T’s T Mobile acquisition announcement: Death by FUD. Regardless of the outcome after regulators have blessed or killed it, the announcement has already hit T Mobile subscribers with a strong dose of fear, uncertainty and doubt. This is clearly demonstrated by data that shows an exodus of customers:
T-Mobile, the smallest of the four national carriers, lost a net 471,000 subscribers on contract-based plans. It was able to add subscribers through wholesalers, who pay much less than contract-signing customers, but it still lost 99,000 overall. Both figures are record losses for T-Mobile, the Bellevue, Wash.-based subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG of Germany.
“There’s no bright spot in these numbers,” said Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst at Recon Analytics.
T-Mobile’s quarterly revenue fell to the level it was at three years ago, just before it got a boost by buying a small regional carrier. In the same period, AT&T’s wireless revenue grew 29 percent (it, too, was aided by some minor acquisitions). (Yahoo)
TMobile has been AT&T’s most annoying competitor. The worst of the bad blood came with AT&T’s exclusive on the iPhone. While it was never announced as policy, TMobile did nothing to prevent jailbroken iPhones from operating on its network. TMobile has also be the most aggressive fo the 4 major wireless providers in price cutting. Those two facts alone makes the removal of #4 from the marketplace very attractive to AT&T.
Does AT&T really intend to complete the takeover? Probably. The fact remains that the infrastructure it would gain could be built new more cheaply. AT&T is already the nations #1 spectrum holder. It should have more than enough airspace if it would add a few towers and beef up its backhaul. After a year or more of deliberation T Mobile’s customer base could be decimated. If the AT&T deal dies, T Mobile could be forced to liquidate. That would give AT&T access to the pieces of the company that it could benefit from the most and take down its pestiest competitor in a single event. Buy or no buy AT&T wins and the consumer loses. It should be a crime.
Big music keeps telling us that file sharing is to blame for the plight of starving recording artists. Even a significant number of high profile musicians have bought into the ruse. At the risk of repeating myself, while file sharing has helped erode industry revenues, the condition of the unpaid artist is as old is the industry itself. Sure a few megastars get big checks and big advances. The rest are typically victimized by creative accounting even if they don’t sign a one sided contract.
In keeping with standard operating procedure, the industry has been applying its traditional style of accounting to music downloads. This hasn’t gone unnoticed, and the numbers are big enough to attract the attention of the legal profession.
I want to be very conservative and so will assume that half the music distributed on iTunes is from catalog sales of artists with older label contracts, and the other half is from music distributed from sales of more newer artists. SoundScan numbers from last year show 648.5 million downloads of “catalog” singles in the US, meaning songs more than 18 months old, compared with 523 million for current tracks, so this seems like a very safe assumption. Using this quick and dirty math, the potential unpaid royalties to artists from just iTunes sales would be around $2.15 billion. Admittedly some of this money has already been paid to music publishers, so the number may be overstated somewhat, and could benefit from a finer accounting. But then again, existing iTunes downloads could be 80% based on catalog sales which would make the number much higher. So the amount is significant. (Future of Music)
A couple of decades ago, there would be no way to question label accounting with this level of specificity. Industry data available to anyone on the free and open Internet provided the third party audit trail that makes this suit likely to succeed.
The same internet transparency that enabled big music to hunt down file sharers may be the instrument of its demise. Is it time for recording artists to celebrate? Maybe. The big pay off in class action suits tends to go to the law firms that handle them. Assuming the Internet remains free and open, it may become simpler to seek legal remedies at a lower cost in the future.
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