Filed under: Desktops

As much as we were hoping to see Steve Jobs and… well, anyone from Psystar settle things in the squared circle, we suppose we’ll have to live with a much more peaceful end to this madness. Rather than spending wads of cash on lawyers for no good reason, the two outfits have agreed to use alternative dispute resolution in order to wrap this scuffle up and move forward. As you may know, ADR is a private process where both parties meet outside of a trial in order to reach some sort of agreement, though we imagine the outcome will be pretty public depending on Psystar’s ability / inability to continue fulfilling orders. We’re told that the process will get going before February of 2009, and the full fling (PDF) with the US district court in the Northern District of California is linked below if you’ve suddenly found yourself with entirely too much free time.

[Via The Mac Observer]

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Way back in December of 2006, NVIDIA and AMD were both pegged for potential price fixing, and nearly two years later it seems it’ll finally be paying the piper. A settlement agreement is detailed in a recently filed 8-K form, which asserts that NVIDIA would pay $850,000 into a total fund of up to $1.7 million, with AMD / ATI probably left to make up the rest. Of note, the 8-K filing does mention that all of this is still “subject to court approval,” but it’s likely that the green light will eventually be given. Outside of that, we’re also informed that NVIDIA will be handing over $112,500 to the individual plaintiffs who brought the case to court. Well, we’re glad that’s settled.

[Via CustomPC]

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Filed under: Cellphones

We could start off by telling you just how much this decision will hurt Qualcomm and just how celebratory the mood must be at Broadcom, but instead, we’ll key you in on this quote: “The appeals court also rejected Qualcomm’s request for a new trial.” At long last, we may have actually heard the end of what has seemed like a never-ending battle between the aforementioned parties. Today, a US Appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that Qualcomm had indeed infringed upon two Broadcom patents while ruling that a third patent in question was invalid. The ruling is obviously a huge win for Broadcom, who will soon be bathing in Benjamins as Qualcomm is forced to pay mandatory royalties for the chips it sells during the “sunset period” ending January 31, 2009.

[Via Reuters]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Transportation, Wireless

Defcon already delivered by exposing California’s FasTrak toll system for the security hole that it is, but that’s not nearly all that’s emerging from the Las Vegas exploitation conference. For starters, a plethora of medical device security researchers have purportedly figured out a way to wirelessly control pacemakers, theoretically allowing those with the proper equipment to “induce the test mode, drain the device battery and turn off therapies.” Of course, it’s not (quite) as simple as just buzzing a remote and putting someone six feet under, but it’s a threat worth paying attention to. In related news, a trio of MIT students who were scheduled to give a speech on how to hack CharlieCards to get free rides on Boston’s T subway were stifled by a temporary restraining order that the university snagged just before the expo. Don’t lie, you’re intrigued — hit up the links below for all the nitty-gritty.

Read - Pacemaker hack
Read - Massachusetts Transit Authority sues MIT hackers
Read - Restraining order on said hackers

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Filed under: Gaming

A select bunch of Transmeta investors may not completely agree with how the outfit is being managed, but one thing’s for sure: it’s bringing in some serious coin on this deal. During a brief timeout from counting those stacks of Benjamins handed over by Intel, it decided to license its Long Run and LongRun 2 technologies (among “other intellectual property”) to NVIDIA for a cool $25 million. Additionally, the agreement grants NVIDIA a “non-exclusive and fully paid-up license” to all of Transmeta’s patents and patent applications. Unfortunately, it’s still unclear how exactly this will end up affecting NVIDIA fanboys (and girls), but we’ll go out on a limb and suggest that a mobile GTX 280 with a remarkably low power draw is just around the bend.

[Via SlashGear]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

According to a state judge in Albany, New York, Dell and its financing arm “engaged in deceptive business practices related to financing promotions for its computers and technical support.” The decision, which was just released yesterday, contained quotes from NY State Supreme Court Justice Joseph C. Teresi stating that the Round Rock mega-corp dabbled in “repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates.” The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo last year, and while Mr. Cuomo was understandably delighted with the outcome, a Dell spokesman made clear that it didn’t agree with the decision and it would be “defending its position vigorously.” As for potential restitution for NYers, we won’t know any of that until further proceedings are held.

[Thanks, Nate]

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Filed under: Gaming

Last we checked we actually weren’t in the Twilight Zone, but quite frankly, the bigwigs at Gibson just might be. Seemingly out of nowhere, the famed guitar manufacturer sparked up a lawsuit against Activision claiming that Guitar Hero titles violate one of its patents. Now the company appears to be on the warpath, suing Wal-Mart, Target, GameStop, Amazon, Toys ‘R’ Us and Kmart in an attempt to get the game off of store shelves. Reportedly, Gibson took “this action reluctantly, but is required to protect its intellectual property.” For the retailers that did comment, they chimed in only to say “we aren’t commenting,” and judging by the looks of things, the games are still widely available — for now.

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Filed under: Cellphones

It’s fairly commonplace for Chinese manufacturers to crank out clones of other popular wares, but apparently, things aren’t brushed off as easily when the cloning gets done by a mega-corp like Toshiba. Granted, quite a bit is lost in translation here, but the long and short of it is that NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu are suing Tosh for creating and selling its 821T — which, as you can see above, looks an awful lot like Fujitsu’s RakuRaku handset. Reportedly, the plaintiffs have demanded that Softbank Mobile withdraw the 821T from the market, but it seems there’s quite a bit more back-and-forth left to go down before the dust settles on this one.

[Via GearFuse]

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

We’ll be straight with you — we aren’t surprised one iota by this one. For those keeping tabs, Samsung’s slate of Blu-ray players have been plagued with issues essentially from day one, and while it has released a flurry of firmware updates over the years in an attempt to mend a variety of incompatibility issues, even its recent BD-UP5000 hybrid player is being axed early on after giving owners all sorts of fits. Apparently, one particular buyer isn’t taking things lying down, and has decided to file suit against the mega-corp alleging that it has sold “defective Blu-ray players” to consumers. According to the suit, Sammy was “fully aware of the defective nature of the player [BD-P1200, in particular] at the time of manufacture and sale,” and it also claims that the firm has “failed to provide a remedy consistent with the products’ intended and represented uses.” More specifically, the verbiage picks on the units’ inability to play back select BD titles, and while some fixes have indeed been doled out, we still get the feeling many consumers have been left dissatisfied. Needless to say, this outcome should be interesting.

[Thank, Nfinity and Prey521]

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Filed under: Gaming

We can’t say that we’re shocked to hear this — you know, considering just how long those Xbox Live holiday blues went on — but Microsoft is indeed being slapped with a class action lawsuit over the aforementioned outages. Reportedly, a trio of angered Texans are alleging that Microsoft didn’t abide by its own contract when network issues disallowed a good chunk of Live users from getting their fix over the past few weeks. According to the complaint, MSFT understood that the time of year would lead to increased activity, yet “failed to provide adequate access and service to Xbox Live and its subscribers.” Of course, we’re betting the Redmond-based lawyers point out that clause about not guaranteeing any minimum level of service, but who knows, maybe we’ll all end up with two shiny new Arcade titles.

[Thanks, Andre and Ben]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Sure, we’ve heard RIAA-admiring lawyers affirm that ripping your own CDs is in fact “stealing,” but it seems the aforementioned entity is putting its money where its mouth is in a case against Jeffrey Howell. Reportedly, the Scottsdale, Arizona resident is being sued by the RIAA, and rather than Mr. Howell just writing a check and calling it a day, he’s fighting back in court. Interestingly, it seems that the industry is maintaining that “it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into their computer.” Ira Schwartz, the industry’s lawyer in the case, is arguing that MP3 files created on his computer from legally purchased CDs are indeed “unauthorized copies,” and while we’ve no idea what will become of all this, we suppose you should go on and wipe those personal copies before you too end up in handcuffs.

[Via BlogRunner]

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Filed under: Cellphones

So, you’ve got an outstanding ticket from talking while behind the wheel in Chicago, do you? Meet attorney Blake Horwitz, who is now likely to be the best friend you don’t even know. Reportedly, Mr. Horwitz is suing the city and claiming that arrests of citizens caught driving and talking were in fact illegal, and furthermore, he’s demanding that Chicago “dismiss any outstanding tickets and refund almost $2 million in fines collected since 2005.” Apparently, the actual law that prevents users from yapping and motoring requires that the city erect signs that instruct drivers not to converse while driving, yet such signs have purportedly not been posted across Chi-town. The devil’s in the details, we suppose.

[Image courtesy of ImportTuner]

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Apparently, DirecTV isn’t looking to pay its lawyers any overtime over the holiday break, as it has been settling outstanding lawsuits recently like it’s going out of style. Just over a week after it put aside its differences with Cox, the satellite provider has decided to make amends with Comcast over a suit filed in May. If you’ll recall, DirecTV was quite flustered by Comcast’s “survey,” which allegedly found that two-thirds of respondents preferred Comcast’s HD picture over that offered up by DISH Network / DirecTV. Notably, the actual terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but spokespeople from both outfits affirmed that they were satisfied with the outcome — which, by the way, does allow Comcast to continue to cite the survey.

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Filed under: Cellphones

No, this isn’t some horrific dream stuck on repeat. The legal quarrels between Nokia and Qualcomm are actually still ongoing, and while a US International Trade Commission judge has indeed issued an initial determination that favors Nokia, you can bet your bottom dollar that Qualcomm will be “petitioning the commission for a review.” Nevertheless, judge Paul Luckern reportedly “found no infringement or violation by Nokia of the three asserted Qualcomm patents,” which consequently led Nokia’s CFO to proclaim that this was simply “another failed attempt by Qualcomm to mislead both Nokia and the telecommunications industry.” Of course, we wouldn’t recommend striking this battle off as complete — after all, the determination now has to be forwarded on to the full commission for review, and it’s not slated to dole out a final call until April.

[Via Yahoo / Reuters]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops, Tablet PCs

You don’t have to look far outside of the Eastern District of Texas to find yourself a fresh patent infringement case, and sure enough, that’s precisely where this one was filed. Getting dinged up today is none other than the Round Rock powerhouse and Motion Computing, both of which are being sued for so-called willful infringement on Typhoon Touch Technologies / Nova Mobility Systems touch panel patents. Apparently, the two defendants are being accused of profiting off of two particular patents without paying the plaintiffs their respective royalties, and the lawsuit is seeking to “enjoin Dell and Motion Computing from the continued violation of [the] patents” while also extracting a presumably hefty sum of cash. No specific products are blamed, but we’re told that the patents cover technology used in tablet PCs, slate PCs, handheld PCs, UMPCs, PDAs and a host of other gear.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

It’s not like ThinkPads have been immune to the notorious overheating battery issue, but a fiery incident in Ohio may not be IBM’s fault. In a somewhat bizarre tale, it’s reported that an Ohioan purchased a replacement battery from Shentech for his ThinkPad, only to later have it overheat, catch on fire and damage his machine. After discovering that the faulty cell was actually a counterfeit, IBM took the liberty of ordering a dozen batteries from the Flushing, New York-based company, and it soon discovered that all twelve received were indeed fakes. As you can probably guess, IBM has filed suit against the outfit and has asked the court to require Shentech to hand over all of its batteries for destruction, profits it made from selling the fakes and a million dollars “per counterfeit mark per type of item sold.” That’ll teach ‘em to mess with Big Blue.

[Via TGDaily]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops

Just months after a slew of OLPC XOs made their way into Nigeria, a Nigerian-owned company is filing suit against Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC Association for patent infringement. Lagos Analysis and subsidiary LANCOR filed the lawsuit on November 22nd in Nigeria, claiming that the aforementioned parties willfully and illegally reverse engineered its keyboard driver source codes. Turns out, LANCOR makes its ends by selling region specific-based keyboards that allow for direct access inputting of “accents, symbols and diacritical marks during regular typing,” and sure enough, the XO’s board looks mighty similar to those offered up by the plaintiff. Additionally, the outfit is in the process of “filing a similar lawsuit against OLPC in a United States Federal Court,” so we’d recommend snagging an XO or two before Nik Neg and company are forced to inflate prices to pay off those highfalutin lawyers.

[Image courtesy of Konyin and Digital Crusader]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Portable Audio

Although we aren’t inclined to believe that this is the first time such a suit has been brought upon Apple, a new one claiming that the Cupertino powerhouse has unlawfully tied the iPod to its iTunes Store has made its way to the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The complaint was filed by a Florida resident on behalf of all Florida-based iPod owners and iTunes Store customers, and it basically alleges that certain limitations — such as the inability to play content purchased through iTunes on anything not labeled an iPod — is “unreasonable and illegal under Florida’s antitrust and unfair trade laws.” Furthermore, the plaintiff claims that Apple willfully disabled embedded support for rival formats, and stated that it was “in possession of monopoly power in the portable digital media player market, the online music market and the online video market.” ‘Course, it’s not like those lawyers at 1 Infinite Loop aren’t used to this stuff by now, and we really can’t see this being the beginning of the end (nor a catalyst for rule changes) for the oh-so-mighty iTunes Store.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Networking

Just a fortnight after the AP called Comcast out for tampering with some users’ ability to swap files over P2P networks, a coalition has formally asked the FCC to stop the operator from interfering with such activity. The petition reportedly asks the Commission to “immediately declare that Comcast is violating the FCC’s policy,” and it’s being supported by the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Media Access Project and professors at the internet practices of the Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools (among others). Separately, Free Press and Public Knowledge are filing a complaint that asks the FCC to demand a “forfeiture from Comcast of $195,000 per affected subscriber.” It’s also said that this will be the “first real test of the FCC’s stance on Net Neutrality,” but there’s no telling how long the Commission will wait before acting on the filings.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals

We had a hunch that this spat between HP and Acer wouldn’t just fade away into the sunset, and sure enough, HP is on the receiving end of the latest scuffle. Most recently, Acer has filed patent counterclaims against HP in the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and with the US International Trade Commission, alleging that HP “infringed on patents related to personal computers, servers and peripheral devices.” Unfortunately, that’s about the extent of it, but Acer did go on to state that it would “take all necessary steps to protect and enforce its patented technologies.” If the gloves weren’t already off, we’d say they are now.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!