Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle purchased Sun, the maker of Java in April 2009 for $5.6 Billion. Fast forward to August of 2010, Oracle has now announced that they’ve filed papers to sue Google over patent infringements of their acquired patent pool from Java.

Oracle Corp. said Thursday it has filed a patent and copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google Inc. Oracle said in a statement that Google’s Android system for mobile phones infringes on its patented Java technology.

Google spokesman Andrew Pederson said the company can’t comment because it has not yet reviewed the lawsuit. Oracle, which makes database software and other technology, acquired the Java computer programming language and related technology when it bought Sun Microsystems. That deal that closed in January.

Java can be used as a platform for building applications for computers, websites and smart phones and other mobile devices. In its complaint, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oracle said Google’s Android operating system software consists of Java applications and other technology. As such, it infringes on one or more parts of seven different patents — something Google should know, Oracle argues, because it has hired former Sun Java engineers in recent years.

Oracle also said Google’s Android also infringes on Oracle’s copyrights in Java. Oracle is seeking an injunction to stop Google from further building and distributing Android, plus higher monetary damages for willful and deliberate infringement.

Guess that Ellison had to find a way to pay for that Sun acquisition after all. I wonder how this will work out, especially since Java went GPL v2 in 2006. We’ll see.

For years wireless carriers have had played fast and loose with the word “unlimited,” advertising their services as such but then quietly imposing caps (usually 5 Gbps) or other restrictions. While Verizon Wireless had their wrist slapped back in 2007 for the practice by New York’s Attorney General, that still didn’t stop many carriers from continuing the practice. Now T-Mobile is being sued in California for inaccurately advertising their limited (10 GB) data services for smartphones as unlimited. Complains the suit:

The only warning given to consumers, according to the suit, is a statement “on the very last page of a T-Mobile brochure, buried in minuscule type barely readable, that ‘Your data session may be slowed, suspended, terminated, or restricted if you use your service in a way that interferes with or impacts our network or ability to provide quality service to other users …”

Parts of the suit are melodramatic for effect, lawyers arguing that the surprise limit makes smartphones “essentially useless for anything other than making or receiving phone calls and text messages.” T-Mobile’s current 10 GB cap is rather generous, and last we checked, unlike some other carriers, T-Mobile only throttles users who cross it they don’t impose unreasonable overages or boot users from the network.

All of that said, the solution for carriers who don’t want suits, user complaints or AG investigations seems pretty simple: stop using the word unlimited, and make your service restrictions clear. False advertising is false advertising, and wireless carriers have been trying to have their cake and eat it too on this front for years. The definition of unlimited is clear, and burying limits for your “unlimited” data plans in fine print on page 50 of your terms of service doesn’t change that fact.

Link to the original article…

While Magic Jack’s cheap VoIP dongle generally works rather well, Broadbandreports.com’s forums are occasionally littered with complaints about the company’s business practices, be it it for little things like a website hit counter that used to artificially inflate their trial participant count (since fixed), or misleading marketing practices (like saying today is the last day of a free trial promotion, every single day). Users generally overlook these problems for one reason: the service is dirt cheap, and works.

Like many companies, Magic Jack also likes burying things in their fine print and terms of service. Among them, the company includes language that requires users engage in binding arbitration – a process that usually ends with the consumer losing, since the arbitration company works for the corporation being complained about. For most of the decade, the courts have repeatedly told companies that this language isn’t legal, but that hasn’t stopped it from being included in TOS anyway.

Back in 2008, gadget and culture blog Boing Boing ran a rather simple post highlighting some of Magic Jack’s more dubious practices, including their bogus free trial user counter, their use of behavioral ad technology, and their inclusion of arbitration language in their terms of service. Magic Jack didn’t like the post very much apparently, because they wound up suing Boing Boing for defamation. Unfortunately for Magic Jack, all of Boing Boing’s claims were true, and Magic Jack has been forced to pay the website $50,000:

We had no idea that it would file a baseless lawsuit to try and shut me up, that CEO Dan Borislow would offer to buy our silence after disparaging his own lawyers, or that MagicJack would ultimately face legal consequences for trying to intimidate critics. . . At several points in the process, we could have taken a check and walked away: as it is, the award doesn’t quite cover our costs. But we don’t like being bullied, and we wanted the chance to tell anyone else threatened by this company what to expect.

According to Boing Boing, Magic Jack’s suit claimed the blog’s post subjected the VoIP outfit to “hate, ridicule and obloquy.” The site claims MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow contacted them once he learned of the tenuous nature of his case in California court, agreed to a settlement, and then subsequently backed out. Once forced to settle, Magic Jack then demanded that the settlement dollar total be kept confidential. Boing Boing, unsurprisingly, didn’t think that was a good idea:

We offered not to publish the amount of this settlement if Borislow would donate $25,000 to charity. MagicJack, however, offered to pay our entire legal bill only if we’d agree to keep the whole dispute confidential; when we refused, Borislow wrote that he would ‘see us in court.’ Nonetheless, we’re happy with the outcome. The irony for MagicJack is that the proceedings are public record, so the silence it sought was effectively worthless.

Of course the lesson learned is that in the Internet age, the harder a company works to stifle criticism, the more attention that criticism gets. The better path is perhaps to listen to what your customers are saying about your business practices, and change them where possible if you value your customers.

Boing Boing has posted all legal documents pertinent to the case for those interested.

Link to the original article…

In the last couple of days, I’ve had three or four of my friends call me and ask if I knew anybody that was looking for a Microsoft XBOX 360 and they all were selling them cheaply. Just over a week, Microsoft banned 1 million XBOX Live Players [Article: CNN] and those machines cannot rejoin the XBOX Live network, which is necessary for updates and playing games online.

This is the stuff that lawyers have wet dreams about. So a week later indeed, there were announcements of an class action lawsuit on the way [Article: Lawyers & Settlements] and at the same time, eBay, Craigslist and other sale outlets [Article: CBC News] are being flooded with these banned XBOX 360′s that look just like any other one until you login to XBOX Live and find out your cheap $100 machine will never get any updates and play online. Sure, it will play games just fine though… but it’s a crippled machine. All because people wanted to be able to pirate games for the Microsoft XBOX 360.

There’s been talk about firmware fixes for those machines that were affected [Article: Tom's Guide] but the fix is a complex set of instructions that will have you probably switching religions and getting the cops called on you because you’ve thrown your HDTV, a trashcan and your Pokémon card collection out of different windows in a fit of rage because you cannot pwn the next dude in Gears of War 2.

So yeah… don’t buy that cheap XBOX. It might be banned.