Quebec Man Ordered To Pay Facebook $873 - million For Spamming The Social Network

A Quebec court has upheld a 2008 California ruling ordering Adam Guerbuez to pay a fine of $100 per spam message sent and another $100 per message in damages to Facebook. Guerbuez's company Atlantis Blue Capital used Facebook to spam users with ads for erectile dysfunction cures a move that has put him and his company in the Guiness Book of World Records for the largest fine ever levied. 

“My client has already filed under the bankruptcy act, so [Facebook becomes] one of his creditors,” said Mr. Guerbuez’s lawyer, Éric Potvin.

“Facebook becomes the biggest one of his creditors,” he added.

Guerbuez had hoped that moving the appeal to his home Province would provide him with some relief from the huge fine, but the court showed no sympathy and upheld the previous ruling. Of course, Facebook doesn't expect to ever receive the full amount of the decision but it certainly has created, at least to some, a deterrent for any such future actions.

Source: The Globe and Mail

eBay Target of $3.8-billion Patent Infringement Suit

The Globe and Mail is reporting that eBay is the target of a $3.8-billion law suit filed Tuesday in Delaware by XPRT Ventures LLC, who cited six patents that they felt eBay had infringed upon in the development of Paypal Pay Later and PayPal Buyer Credit.

In the complaint "XPRT said that when eBay on April 30, 2003 filed a patent application titled “Method and System to Automate Payment for a Commerce Transaction,” it failed to tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office it knew of XPRT’s own patent applications." XPRT says information was shared in confidence with eBay by the inventors on XPRT’s own patents.

"XPRT is seeking a minimum $3.8 billion in monetary damages, based on their estimated present value. It is also seeking treble damages resulting from eBay’s alleged “willful and malicious conduct,” punitive damages, and other remedies."

Court Ordered Publication Ban Broken By Social Media Users

Rules in place to protect victims of crimes and, in many cases, minors are being inadvertently undermined by bloggers and social media site users. The concept of publication bans by the courts has been around for years, at least here in Canada, and have kept journalists from publishing details of certain cases that the court deems necessary in order to protect some or all of the parties involved. While journalists are well aware of the consequences of reporting on these details, it appears as though the general public is ill informed, ignorant, or oblivious to the concept of publication bans. Case in point, a judge in the case of a man involved in a recent abduction case in Moncton New Brunswick has placed details of the incident under a publication ban. Yet the writings of a social media user clearly ties the victim of the case to the incident. It will be interesting to see how the court reacts to this regardless of whether or not the unfortunate remarks have since been removed.

Source: CBC

Apple Sues HTC Over Smartphone Related Patents

It seems as though the competition is heating up in the smartphone market in more ways than one! Apple has decided to confront HTC in the courts with claims of patent infringement on more than 20 of it's patents related to user interface and hardware.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. “We’ve decided to do something about it.” 

For it's part HTC spokeswoman Linda Mills said “HTC values patent rights and their enforcement but is also committed to defending its own technology innovations,”

It was bound to happen sooner or later, HTC and Android based phones are starting to make a dent in the market place...

 

Source: Globe and Mail

Google Fighting Italian Courts Decision On Behalf Of Employees

In a post on The Official Google Blog titled "Serious threat to the web in Italy" Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa, describes a court battle that is being waged in Italy where three employees and a former employee of the company are being indicted for criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. The case involves a video that was posted to Google Video that showed school children bullying an autistic classmate. The video was taken down within hours of it's posting and Google worked with local authorities to identify those involved in the incident. However a judge in Milan convicted 3 of the 4 defendants for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code while all 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation.

Sucherman writes:

"In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision."

 

Incredible...  

Microsoft Given Stay On Word Injunction - Can Sell Product During Busy Back To School Season

On August 12th a court in Texas ruled that Microsoft had infringed upon the patent of I4i, a small Toronto company, and ordered the software giant to pay $290m in damages and to stop sales of the relevant versions of Word. Microsoft then quickly filed a request to stay the injunction and asked that the courts put the appeal on a fast track so it could be heard quickly. The US court has agreed that Microsoft had met the conditions needed to grant the stay.

"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," said Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, in a statement.

Source: BBC

$80,000 Per Shared Song Awarded To RIAA

24 songs shared by a single mom from Minnesota via Kazaa have been the center of a law suit brought upon Jammie Thomas-Rasset by the Recording Industry Association of America. On Friday a federal jury in Minnesota found the 32-year-old mother of four guilty of copyright infringement and ordered her to pay $1.92-million or $80,000 per song shared. Her reaction, “There’s no way they’re ever going to get that,” Ms. Thomas-Rasset said after the verdict. “I’m a mom, limited means, so I’m not going to worry about it now.”

For their part the RIAA said this in an e-mail, “When the facts are presented to juries on these issues, they take this issue seriously and appreciate the real harm that’s done to the music community,”

It's not clear whether or not Thomas-Rasset will challenge the decision but I sure hope she does. I also hope that none of the jurors have kids who have shared any music online, or they may live to regret their ruling in this case...

Source: Globe and Mail

Quebec Government Being Sued By Open-Source Association

The CBC is reporting that the government of Quebec is being sued by the province's open-source software association - Facil. The association says the government of Quebec refuses to entertain competing bids from software providers, choosing instead to purchase products from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle. The CBC says "Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally." Facil president Mathieu Lutfy told the CBC that "It goes against the public markets policy of the government, which requires them to stimulate competition and look for local alternatives. It's really an absurdity." Facil estimates that the government is spending over $80 million a year on licences for Windows Vista alone!

Hasbro Launches Lawsuit Against Scrabulous Developers

This story has been dragging on for a while now, but Hasbro has finally launched a lawsuit against brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla the makers of Scrabulous. “Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Hasbro’s general counsel Barry Nagler, in a statement. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.” Interestingly the suit comes only after the launch of a beta version of an official Scrabble game which leads to the question did Hasbro try to do a deal with the Agarwalla brothers or did they wait until their own online version of the game was complete before taking real action? Either way Hasbro's version has a lot of catching up to do with nearly 9,000 active Facebook players Thursday while Scrabulous had over 500,000. More from the LA Times here, and the New York Times here.

Google Ordered To Hand Over YouTube Logs To Viacom

Viacom has been awarded the rights to view YouTubes logs in order to prove its assertion that illegal content has greater appeal than that produced by amateurs. The logs in question contain the username of the YouTube user as well has their IP address. The court however denied Viacom's request for Google's search code. While the intent is not to know what "you" have watched specifically but rather how many people are watching copy righted materials vs. skateboarding dog videos, the potential is there for someone to link you to what you have viewed on the site. From a privacy perspective it's a little scarey! PCWorld.com article here.

French Courts Rule Against ebay

A french court has ruled that ebay must pay 40 million euros in restitution for knock off goods and unauthorized distribution of legitimate goods. LVMH, representing Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy was awarded the settlement that ebay says it will appeal. At issue was the sale of knock off Louis Vuitton handbags, Christian Dior clothing, and "illicit" Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy perfume that only specialist dealers were permitted to sell. LVMH spokesman Pierre Godet told French news agency AFP that the decision "protected brands by considering them an important part of French heritage". In ebay's defense, Vanessa Canzini, an eBay spokeswoman, said: "If counterfeits appear on our sites, we take them down swiftly, but today’s ruling is not about our fight against counterfeit.

"Today’s ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers everyday.

"We will fight this ruling on their behalf; we will be seeking leave to appeal.”

If ebay can't sell knock offs, what's left?

BBC story here.

Boring Lawsuit Filed Against Google For Street View Photos

Aaron and Christine Boring of Pittsburgh's Franklin Park area have filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Google over pictures of their home that appeared in Google's Street View. The Boring's contend that images appearing on Street View had to have been taken from their driveway, which they say was posted as a private road. Google's response has been to remove the offending images, and company spokesman Larry Yu says "We absolutely respect that people may not be comfortable with some of the imagery on the site," and "We actually make it pretty easy for people to submit a request to us to remove the imagery." The Boring's attorney Dennis Moskal says "Isn't litigation the only way to change a big business' conduct with the public?" adding "What happened to their accountability?"

I find this all a bit funny, how many people do you think actually viewed the photo's of their home before the lawsuit was filed? Don't you think that they have brought more attention upon themselves by going the litigation route rather than using the mechanism offered by Google? Or dare I say it, is money actually the motivating factor? Globe and Mail article here. Smoking Gun article here.

Facebook's big challenge

Three former Harvard school mates of Mark Zuckerberg are alleging, in court, that Zuckerberg stole their ideas and created Facebook before they were able to launch their own competing site, ConnectU. Zuckerberg is being accused of fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. The 3 ConnectU founders claim that they asked Zuckerberg to create code for their site and that he promised to be working on the code when in fact he was creating Facebook. The lawsuit seeks to shut down the rival site, claiming that Facebook was able to be first to market and gain the advantage. Facebook lawyers say ConnectU has no evidence for "broad-brush allegations" against Zuckerberg. Globe and Mail story here.