HTC staring down the barrel of a US sales ban after Nokia's patent coup. Electronic gadgets made by HTC infringed two of Nokia's patents, US officials have ruled - and it's a decision that could lead to a ban on sales in America, or at least convince HTC to cough up some royalties.
Shockwaves from the judgement by the Uncle Sam's International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington [PDF, mind-numbing] won't be felt immediately: both sides of the dispute get to argue against it. But the outcome could lead to a ban on US imports of HTC handsets or, more likely, HTC biting the bullet and paying Nokia for the rights to use the Finns' technology for attenuating radio reception. Specifically, the infringed inventions cover "an arrangement for transmitting and receiving RF signals" and "a method and radio receiver for attenuating spurious signals. " You see, these patents aren't part of the GSM standard. The patents do still belong to Nokia, not Microsoft, despite its acquisition of Nokia's handset division.
Microsoft 'cooperates' with wide US cash-for-contracts bribery probe. Microsoft says it will cooperate with US investigators probing alleged bribery of foreign officials.
It's claimed Redmond's resellers bunged cash to apparatchiks in Russia and Pakistan in return for contracts with state-backed businesses. The software giant's deputy general counsel John Frank blogged here that his company takes “every allegation seriously” and “we cooperate fully in any government inquiries”. “Like other large companies with operations around the world, we sometimes receive allegations about potential misconduct by employees or business partners, and we investigate them fully, regardless of the source,” Frank said. The brief spoke out following a Wall Street Journal report (subscription needed) that the US Department of Justice and watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are expanding an existing, preliminary probe into whether Microsoft employees and business partners had used bribes to secure certain deals. YouTube Wars: Microsoft cries foul as Windows Phone app pulled again. High performance access to file storage Analysis Microsoft has publicly criticized Google for failing to live up to its commitment to openness, after being told to pull its custom-built YouTube app from the Windows Phone Store for the third time.
YouTube has had a rocky history on the Windows Phone platform. Since early this year, Microsoft's legal team has accused Google of intentionally undermining Windows Phone by blocking Microsoft's access to certain YouTube APIs, resulting in a degraded user experience. In fact, the earliest version of YouTube for Windows Phone was little more than a repackaged version of the YouTube mobile website. But when Microsoft rewrote its app to more closely resemble the ones on Android and iOS, Google accused it of violating YouTube's terms and conditions and demanded that the app be taken down.
The fruits of that collaboration seemed to have arrived on Thursday, when Vulture South spotted a new YouTube app in the Windows Phone Store. Is Google playing fair? Lawsuit claims Microsoft misled investors in Surface RT fiasco. High performance access to file storage A US law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Microsoft shareholders, alleging that Redmond misled investors when it failed to alert them to dismally poor sales of its ARM-based Surface RT fondleslabs.
According to a press release issued by the law firm of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd on Monday, the suit charges Microsoft with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including failing to disclose "then presently known trends, events, or uncertainties" in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In addition to the corporation itself, Microsoft execs and former execs Steve Ballmer (CEO), Peter Klein (ex-CFO), Frank Brod (VP of finance), and Tami Reller (executive VP of marketing, former Windows head) are named as individual defendants. Until recently, Microsoft had indeed held its Surface sales figures close to its chest. Then came the other shoe. Microsoft DMCA takedown requests targeting OpenOffice. High performance access to file storage The vigilant folk at TorrentFreak think they've found something odd: among the hundreds of thousands of sites Microsoft has recently asked Google not to index are requests to remove references to sites that in no way infringe Microsoft's rights but instead mention the the free OpenOffice suite.
TorrentFreak's report on the matter links to several documents that chillingefects.org says are actual requests from Microsoft to Google. Some of the links Chillingeffects' documents mention offer links to what appear to be pirated copies of Microsoft Office. Others appeared to be scams that employ keyword-laden text featuring terms ways of accessing Office for free, but insist on email registration before the ill-gotten loot can be obtained.