Mar
18
Source: Yahoo News
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WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday handed Microsoft Corp. a defeat by refusing to rule on the software giant’s request to halt an antitrust suit against it.
The suit was brought in 2004 by Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc., which said in court papers that Microsoft “deliberately targeted and destroyed” its WordPerfect and QuattroPro programs in order to protect its Windows operating system monopoly.
Novell alleged that Microsoft targeted the programs because they could run on alternative operating systems and therefore could enable alternatives to Windows to gain market share.
Microsoft argued in court filings that Novell did not compete in the operating systems market, and therefore cannot claim to have been harmed by alleged anticompetitive conduct by Microsoft in that market.
A federal district court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., sided with Novell and allowed the suit to proceed. Microsoft’s lawyers said that decision expands the application of antitrust laws “far beyond their intended scope.”
Plaintiffs in antitrust suits can seek damages that are triple the actual harm.
A federal court ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had illegally protected its Windows operating system monopoly. As part of a settlement with the federal government and 17 states the following year, Microsoft agreed to court oversight of its business practices. A federal judge in January extended that oversight to November 2009.
The federal government’s antitrust lawsuit focused on Microsoft’s anticompetitive actions against Netscape and Sun Microsystems Inc. Novell argues that its software is similar to Netscape’s Navigator browser and Sun’s Java: neither competed directly with Windows, but Microsoft saw them as benefiting potential competitors.
Novell sold WordPerfect and QuattroPro to Corel Corp. in 1996.
Despite the suit, the two companies later became business partners. In 2006 Microsoft agreed to pay Novell $240 million to license its Linux enterprise software and to spend $94 million over five years to market both Novell’s software and Windows to its corporate customers. Microsoft also agreed to pay Novell $108 million under a patent agreement.
The deal also required Novell to pay millions in royalties to Microsoft.
The Supreme Court’s decision allows Novell’s lawsuit to continue. Microsoft said it would defend itself in lower court. “We believe the facts will show that Novell’s claims, which are 12 to 14 years old, are without merit,” David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, said in an e-mail.
The case is Microsoft Corp. v. Novell Inc., 07-924. Chief Justice John Roberts, who owns Microsoft stock, recused himself from the decision
Mar
18
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dish Network Corp. on Monday asked a federal appeals court to rehear a patent dispute with TiVo Inc., saying the court’s earlier ruling in TiVo’s favor relied on inaccurate testimony from a TiVo w
In January, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with a lower court that digital video recorders distributed by Dish, formerly known as EchoStar Communications Corp., violated the software elements of TiVo’s patent.
That ruling overturned the lower court’s finding that Dish infringed on the hardware elements of the patent.
At stake is $94 million in damages the lower court awarded digital video recorder maker TiVo.
In a petition filed Monday, Dish said an expert witness who testified for TiVo contradicted himself and that means the software infringement verdict wasn’t “supported by substantial evidence.”
A third win for TiVo will boost the DVR pioneer’s negotiating power in licensing deals with cable and satellite TV providers. TiVo already has signed agreements with Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc.
Satellite TV provider DirecTV Group Inc. will pay TiVo royalties through 2010, though it no longer sells TiVo-based boxes, having opted for its own DVR.
The suit comes as management at Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo struggles to turn the company toward profitability. TiVo has been in the red for most of its 11-year existence, but quarterly losses shrank in the fourth quarter, which ended January 31
Source: Yahoo News
Mar
18
Is Wall Street close to a bottom?
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BRUSSELS, Belgium - The European Union on Monday chose a mobile TV broadcast standard and suggested that its member governments now ask cell carriers to favor it.
EU commissioners chose DVB-H, or Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds, the most widely used mobile TV format in Europe, over rival standards such as Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFLO and another known as DMB that is favored by Chinese and South Korean manufacturers.
DVB-H is supported by the world’s largest handset maker, Nokia, as well as Motorola, Philips, Sagem, Sony, Ericsson, Samsung and major European cell phone operators Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile. By contrast, Qualcomm’s technology has signed up the two biggest players in the United States - Verizon Wireless and AT&T.
The European Commission said it had to order EU nations to favor DVB-H to create economies of scale and get the nascent technology off the ground.
“They can do that by labeling, they can do that by promoting it in attributing licenses and so on,” said EU spokesman Martin Selmayr.
The EU called on other nations to follow its example.
The EU’s executive is entitled to make decisions on some technical standards on behalf of member governments, which it did, for instance, in pushing the Global System for Mobile communications, or GSM, for mobile phones.
That decision is recognized as leading Europeans to switch to cell phones faster than people in the United States have.
Selmayr said the European Commission believed it was important to forestall a war on standards that could have held back mobile broadcasting in Europe.
The impact of the EU’s choice is limited: EU nations can choose to avoid making decisions favoring the format and are under no obligation to eliminate other standards.
Ovum analyst Matthew Howett said the development and use of other technologies is still possible although EU backing for one standard creates “some certainty” for operators planning mobile broadcasting services and manufacturers making phones and chips.
The EU cited research forecasts of a steep increase in demand for mobile TV in 2009, with the worldwide market reaching $31 billion in sales by 2011
Mar
15
Peer-to-peer networks go legit
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NEW YORK - The technology best known for pirating movies, music and software online is increasingly being adopted by businesses as a cheap way to get video content to customers.
A number of startups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology and have convinced some big-name media companies to use them to deliver legal content.
“In 2005 when we met with content owners, ‘peer-to-peer’ was a dirty word,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. “In 2007, finally, content owners came and said ‘Yeah, we think there’s a role for P2P.’”
Levitan was speaking Friday at the first “P2P Market Conference” of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more than 100 members.
Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It’s providing the means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.
But 90 percent of P2P downloads are still of illegally copied content, according to David Hahn, vice president of product management at SafeNet Inc., which tracks the networks.
Hahn said 12 million to 15 million people are file-sharing across the world at any one time, mainly on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. The attraction of file-sharing is not just that it’s free - there’s also content available that can’t be had by legal means, like TV shows that haven’t aired in Europe.
The BitTorrent software was invented and set free on the Net in 2002 by Bram Cohen. He later started a company to profit from the technology. In 2005, BitTorrent Inc. stopped providing links to copyright content in 2005 and now helps studios distribute movies.
Overall, acceptance of P2P technology is higher in Western Europe, where piracy using the technology also happens to be especially rampant, according to SafeNet.
The British Broadcasting Corp. uses P2P technology from Verisign Inc. for its iPlayer, which streams some of its most popular shows. French TV channels are using software from 1-Click Media, which claims 1 million users per day. The Norwegian public broadcasting service recently started using BitTorrent software to get its shows out.
Media companies don’t need P2P technology to provide video over the Internet. They can hire so-called content delivery networks, or CDNs, to get the media to their customers, at a cost of about 25 to 35 cents per gigabyte. Doug Walker, chief executive of BitTorrent Inc., put the size of this market at $680 million this year.
But P2P technology can offload much of the work of the CDNs by having subscribers who have downloaded the data already send it to subscribers who haven’t. That cuts the cost of delivery by anywhere from 50 to 90 percent, according to several of the companies presenting at the conference.
The P2P programs used by Pando and Verisign are quite different from BitTorrent and eDonkey. They don’t let consumers distribute their own content. What comes down the pipe is strictly from the media companies that contract with the P2P companies. The consumers may not even know they’re using P2P software - all they know is that they’ve installed video player software on the computer.
So far, Internet service providers have been left out of the equation even though they’re saddled with the burden of conveying all the extra traffic. Some of them have partially blocked or slowed down P2P traffic to keep it from swamping their networks.
But the adversarial relationship is changing: At the conference, Verizon Communications Inc. presented results of a test that showed that by sharing information on its network with Pando so it could optimize downloads, the companies were able to speed downloads and reduce Verizon’s cost of carrying the traffic.
However, not all Internet service providers are likely to get on board with that solution. It may work well for phone companies, but cable companies have a different structure to their networks, and it may not address their concerns.
Sores: Yahoo News
Mar
15
Man pleads guilty in e-mail spam case
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SEATTLE - A man once described as one of the world’s top e-mail spammers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, and failure to file a tax return.
Robert Alan Soloway, 29, was dubbed “the spam king” by prosecutors who said he used networks of compromised computers to send out millions upon millions of junk e-mails since 2003.
He was arrested last summer and charged in a 40-count indictment. He agreed to plead guilty to the three charges and the rest were dropped, including e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and numerous other counts of mail and wire fraud.
Prosecutors said Soloway made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his spamming business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp. When he’s sentenced in June, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman will determine how much restitution he must pay.
The government already seized at least four of his bank accounts, and Soloway has agreed to take a polygraph test as to his remaining assets.
He could face up to 20 years in prison
Sores :Yahoo News
Mar
15
Woman to record industry: Stop spying
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PORTLAND, Ore. - A woman who claims the recording industry’s anti-music piracy campaign threatens and intimidates innocent people has filed a new complaint accusing record companies of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying.
Tanya Andersen originally sued the Recording Industry Association of America after RIAA representatives threatened to interrogate her young daughter if she didn’t pay thousands of dollars for music she downloaded from somebody else.
Her amended complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland seeks national class-action status for other people allegedly victimized by the industry’s anti-piracy campaign and the company it hired, MediaSentry.
The new lawsuit claims accuses the industry and MediaSentry of spying “by unlicensed, unregistered and uncertified private investigators” who “have illegally entered the hard drives of tens of thousands of private American citizens” in violation of laws “in virtually every state in the country.”
The information was used to file “sham” lawsuits intended only as intimidation to further the anti-piracy campaign, the lawsuit said.
Lory Lybeck, the attorney for the Beaverton woman, said the lawsuit is partly aimed at forcing the industry to reveal how extensive the spying had become.
“We’re very pleased that we’ll finally be able to force the RIAA and MediaSentry to give up secret records they have steadfastly refused to disclose in tens of thousands of cases that they’ve filed,” Lybeck said.
Jonathan Lamy, an industry spokesman, said the new complaint repeats old claims.
“It is unfortunate that this case continues to drag on after the court previously deemed all of Ms. Andersen’s claims inadequate,” Lamy said. “We hope to resolve the case in short order.”
The complaint notes the case began when Andersen, a single mother, was sitting down for dinner with her then 8-year-old daughter at their home in August 2005 and a legal process server knocked on her door with notice of an RIAA lawsuit falsely alleging copyright infringement and demanding penalties.
The lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Donald Ashmanskas and Andersen countersued.
Her complaint is similar to one filed in federal court against the industry by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers on behalf of the University of Oregon to protect the privacy of university students the RIAA has accused of music piracy.
Stephanie Soden, spokeswoman for Myers, said Friday that the state is monitoring the Andersen lawsuit.
“We’re definitely watching it closely,” she said
Mar
15
CHICAGO - Craigslist should not be held liable for discriminatory housing ads posted on the popular Web site, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
The decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a win for San Francisco-based Craigslist, an online network of classified ads and forums on which more than 30 million notices are posted every month, according to the ruling.
It is also a triumph for Internet sites that depend on user-generated content and for foes of legal boundaries for the Web, experts said.
The ruling means “the soapbox is not liable for what the speaker has said,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech online.
The lawsuit, filed by a consortium of Chicago attorneys in February 2006, accused Craigslist of violating federal housing laws by publishing more than 100 ads that excluded potential buyers or tenants on the basis of race, gender or religion.
Among the housing ads cited as objectionable by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc. were ones that read “NO MINORITIES,” “Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male” and “Only Muslims apply.”
Discriminatory ads would not be possible if Craigslist didn’t offer the forum, according to Friday’s ruling.
“That is not, however, a useful definition of cause,” the court said. “One might as well say that people who save money `cause’ bank robbery, because if there were no banks there could be no bank robberies.”
The decision upholds a November 2006 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve ruled that Craigslist serves as an intermediary party, not a publisher. She also said the federal Communications Decency Act protects sites that allow users to post unedited messages and communicate freely in forums.
“We’re pleased the Court agreed that online service providers like Craigslist should not be held liable as `publishers’ of content submitted by their users, and view this outcome as a win for the general public’s ability to self-publish content (such as free classified ads) on the Internet,” Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said in a statement Friday.
The Chicago Lawyers’ Committee said in a statement the group would not give up trying to root out housing providers who discriminate.
“While we are of course disappointed with the overall outcome of the case, we are gratified that the Court emphasized in the final paragraph of its decision that landlords and other housing providers who post discriminatory advertisements remain fully liable under the federal fair housing laws,” the group said.
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Mar
15
Microsoft, Yahoo execs finally meet
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SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Corp. met with Yahoo Inc. to discuss the software maker’s unsolicited takeover bid earlier this week, a breakthrough that could be the first step toward a friendly deal between the two rivals.
The meeting occurred Monday near Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters, according to a person familiar with the situation. The person spoke Friday on the condition of not being identified because the preliminary talks haven’t been formally disclosed.
No investments bankers attended Monday’s meeting, nor was there any discussion about whether Microsoft is willing to raise its offer, initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. Yahoo’s board already has rejected that bid, arguing the company’s Internet franchise is worth more.
Although it’s unclear whether Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and his Yahoo counterpart, Jerry Yang, attended Monday’s meeting, senior management from both companies were on hand.
The gathering, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, gave Microsoft its first chance to sell Yahoo on the rationale for the proposed marriage since the software maker unveiled its plans six weeks ago.
Since then, Yang has been exploring different ways to ward off Microsoft. The alternatives have included possible alliances with Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc., News Corp.’s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.
Microsoft has held firm with its bid and warned it’s prepared to pursue a hostile takeover if Yahoo continues to resist.
Most industry analysts believe neither side wants to engage in an acrimonious battle and expect Microsoft to resolve the impasse with a slightly higher bid.
Investors aren’t so sure the stakes will be raised. Yahoo shares fell 79 cents to $26.71 Friday while Microsoft shares shed 66 cents to $27.96. At that price, Microsoft’s offer - made partly in Microsoft stock - is worth about $40 billion.
The saga could still take several weeks to play out and may not be resolved until Yahoo releases its first-quarter earnings April 22. With Yahoo mired in a two-year slump, the first-quarter results could sway Microsoft’s next move.
The waiting game works in Google’s favor by distracting two of its biggest rivals while it strives to extend its dominance of the Internet’s lucrative search and advertising market. Google added another layer of muscle this week by completing its $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service, DoubleClick Inc.
Microsoft believes a combination with Yahoo will pose a more serious threat to Google.
By finally meeting with Microsoft executives, Yahoo could be laying the groundwork for more serious negotiations. Or Yahoo’s board could just be touching base with Microsoft to show shareholders that it heard out its suitor before working out an alternative deal.
Yahoo’s other options have been considered a long shot by most analysts and now there are signs that at least two of its potential partners aren’t interested in getting together.
Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., downplayed his interest in a Yahoo deal at a conference this week. And AOL’s plan to buy online social network Bebo for $850 million in a deal announced Thursday may make a combination of AOL with Yahoo more complicated.
Google has offered to work with Yahoo, but analysts say antitrust regulations will make it difficult, if not impossible, for those two companies to become business partners.
Yahoo still doesn’t appear to be any rush to resolve the saga, based on how it’s handling a key deadline for nominating candidates to supplant its current board. Microsoft has threatened an attempt to oust Yahoo’s 10 directors if it can’t broker an amicable takeover.
Last week, Yahoo postponed the deadline from Friday to 10 days after the date Yahoo announces its annual meeting.
Yahoo has no plans to disclose the meeting date before April and may not do so until its first-quarter earnings come out, according to a person close to the company. The person wasn’t authorized to be identified publicly.
Source: Yhoo News