Intellectual Property Archive

  • HTC slaps phone firmware site with cease and desist letter

    HTC slaps phone firmware site with cease and desist letter

    Posted on June 17, 2010 | No Comments
    You might be familiar with firmware impresario Conflipper by now, a man who's earned a reputation tearing apart ROMs -- often for unreleased devices -- and pulling out the juicy bits for everyone to see. Turns out the dude runs a site called Shipped ROMs with... yes, you guessed it, a bunch of shipped ROMs for a wide variety of phones on it, and it seems HTC's legal cats in Taiwan have taken issue, saying they've got "very strong reasons to believe that the HTC Intellectual Property was illegally obtained by fraudulent means" in a strongly-worded cease and desist letter sent to him earlier today. We reached out to HTC's US branch for comment and got back the following:
    "While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC. That content is not just the open source parts and kernels of Android but all of the software that HTC itself has developed. This is a clear violation of our copyrights and HTC needs to defend itself in these cases."
    In other words, these guys are just really against hosting official ROMs on unofficial servers. Anyone can dump a ROM from a phone and flesh it out, so we can't imagine there's any competitive concern -- and no first-party site makes so many firmware builds available for so many devices in such a concise, well-organized way as Shipped ROMs is doing. Ultimately, it's HTC's property -- it seems like they're probably in the legal right here -- but the unsavory PR effect with some of the company's staunchest enthusiasts makes the endeavor more trouble than it's worth, we'd argue. Tread carefully, HTC.

    HTC slaps phone firmware site with cease and desist letter originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Motorola and RIM settle patent dispute with a good old cross-licensing deal

    Motorola and RIM settle patent dispute with a good old cross-licensing deal

    Posted on June 14, 2010 | No Comments
    We always like to hear of companies burying the hatchet (and the lawyers with it, if at all possible), and our latest source of good vibes are two North American phone makers that have been at each other's throats over patents since early 2008. Motorola and RIM had a previous intellectual property-sharing deal that expired at the end of '07 and with the companies unable to come to a suitable extension agreement, it all spiraled out into a big and silly legal discord. That has at long last been settled now, with RIM paying a one-off fee and regular royalties, as well as licensing some of its own patent catalog out to Moto, in exchange for using the Americans' knowhow in WiFi and other areas. All in all, an inevitable conclusion to an unnecessarily legalized negotiation. Now how about both you guys get back to building us those QWERTY sliders and 2GHz Androids?

    Motorola and RIM settle patent dispute with a good old cross-licensing deal originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Palm Shake-Up Imminent, Rubinstein May Be Out

    Palm Shake-Up Imminent, Rubinstein May Be Out

    Posted on April 23, 2010 | No Comments
    Palm right now is a disaster. Its sales are going nowhere, its market share is plummeting, and try as it might, it can't even find a buyer. Industry sources tell us that a major restructuring and management shakeup is imminent and CEO Jon Rubinstein may be replaced. This is still a rumor at this point, but it makes sense. Palm is suffering from a ton of unsold inventory, and it cannot keep up with Apple, Android, or Blackberry in the smartphone wars. Palm clearly needs to be bought at this point if it is going to survive, and Rubinstein may not be the right person to make that sale. Rubinstein came from Apple, where he was head of hardware. He was recruited by Palm's biggest investor Elevation Partners. Rubinstein is great engineer, but not a great marketer. It appears he is having trouble selling Palm, even as a distressed asset.

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  • Lawmakers have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technology

    Lawmakers have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technology

    Posted on April 9, 2010 | No Comments
    Oh. My. God. Over in the UK, they're in the process of passing the Digital Economy Bill, which three seconds of research suggests is analogous to the DMCA here in the U.S. Better people than I have already written extensively about why it's Truly Evil, but this is pretty funny. "Copyright owners are currently able to go on-line, look for material to which they hold the copyright and identify unauthorised sources for that material. They can then seek to download a copy of that material and in so doing capture information about the source including the Intellectual Property (IP) address..." Pretty sure "IP" stands for "Internet Protocol," but what are you gonna do?

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  • Apple hit with iPhone digital camera patent lawsuit

    Apple hit with iPhone digital camera patent lawsuit

    Posted on December 4, 2009 | No Comments
    Looks like Apple's lawyers will be extra busy in the coming days. Some entity by the name of St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants has filed suit against the house that Jobs built, alleging that the iPhone infringes upon several of its patents.

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  • Tabletop gaming hits the silver screen

    Tabletop gaming hits the silver screen

    Posted on September 30, 2009 | No Comments
    Anyone who plays Warhammer 40K knows how much work goes into your army. The modeling, the filing, the painting, on and on and on. Then you send hours compiling your army list, carefully pack the Emperor’s superhuman servants in foam, take them down to the local game shop, and for what? To have them destroyed [...]

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  • Desktop Factory hits the dead pool

    Desktop Factory hits the dead pool

    Posted on August 13, 2009 | No Comments
    Goodbye, Desktop Factory, we hardly knew ye. This company was supposed to offer a sub-$5,000 desktop 3D printer. Alas, they are no more and they’ve sold their IP and assets to an unnamed buyer. But a funny thing happened as we launched our effort to sell Desktop Factory. We found interested parties who do understand [...]

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  • Palm Pre said to sync up nicely with Apple’s iTunes

    Palm Pre said to sync up nicely with Apple’s iTunes

    Posted on May 28, 2009 | No Comments

    There's been no direct confirmation just yet, but Fortune has it that Palm's hotly anticipated Pre actually syncs with iTunes. Yeah, iTunes. According to the report, the Pre works "seamlessly" with iTunes on a Mac, with the only notable limitation being that it can't handle older DRM-laced files from the sad, sad days of our past. Even wilder, we're told that the iTunes Store "treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone" save for the aforesaid exception, which leads us to wonder how Apple will react. There's little doubt that this factoid sweetens the Pre value proposition for diligent Mac users, but is this functionality kosher with the software's creator? We already saw Tim Cook glance sternly at Palm while uttering that if anyone else "ripped off its intellectual property, it would go after them," and we highly doubt he plans on backing down if push comes to shove. If true, this could definitely trigger an interesting chain of events -- we'll know soon enough, now won't we?

    [Via TUAW]

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    Palm Pre said to sync up nicely with Apple's iTunes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 May 2009 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • One more thing: The Palm Pre syncs with iTunes

    One more thing: The Palm Pre syncs with iTunes

    Posted on May 28, 2009 | No Comments
    Per a Fortune blog, the Palm Pre syncs "seamlessly" with iTunes. It's not that shocking considering there are apps that add this functionality to many MP3 players and smartphones. However, this is the first phone besides the iPhone of course that has this ability out of the box. Don't expect to load your iTunes Music Store purchases on the phone as it can't handle the DRM. Your what.cd downloads will work fine though.

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