From the Department of Public Safety and General Preparedness comes this story of one man, a Cisco engineer, and his headline-making ordeal of having his possessions searched upon re-entry to the U.S. following an international flight. (It’s also the story of run-on sentences.) The man, Mohamed Shommo, told the Associated Press that border agents rifled through his digital camera’s photos, his Google searches and the files on his iPod. That’s all done in the name of Your Safety, mind.

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This is great. There’s something to be said for the defense of exaggeration or idiom in advertising — for instance, Red Bull doesn’t literally give you wings. Of course, nobody’s suing Red Bull for false advertising. But when the statement is the totally believable “Twice as fast, half the price,” and you support the ad with fraudulent video showing the product in question accomplishing tasks at unrealistic speeds, you might be pushing it. And yet, Apple’s defense is that:

“…No reasonable person in Plaintiff’s position could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple’s statements as claims of fact.”

Ha! Well, you can be sure nobody will consider Apple’s statements “claims of fact” now!

Yeah, the lawsuit is questionable, but the response is classic.

Last week’s attacks in India have reminded us all of the keen danger that terrorism poses. But one tool that was to be employed at airports to combat terrorism, those body scanners that sometimes reveal a person’s, well, person, came under criticism. Fighting terror (inasmuch as you can fight it) is great and all, but should people literally be exposed in the process? The Germans say no, and are developing a body scanner that, while it does its job (detecting weapons and so forth), doesn’t show off your nude body to the leering airport screeners.

The new scanner will undergo proper laboratory tests this week.

The full-on “naked scanner” is already in use in other European countries such as the Netherlands.

Also, Germany-Netherlands make a fine football rivalry. Three cheers for random, tangentially related information!

It’s no secret that Apple wants everyone to use iTunes, especially to sync with their iPod. I personally can’t stand iTunes and prefer Winamp, and many others share my view but have enjoyed Apple hardware. Some more code-savvy people than myself have in years past determined how to read and write to the proprietary iTunesDB file, allowing non-Apple software to sync with iPods.

Apple countered by encrypting the file, which encryption was cracked before two days were out. They’ve now re-encrypted it, and some folks at BluWiki have been discussing how to once again get at the information to allow third-party programs to be able to sync. At least, until Apple sent them a takedown notice citing DMCA laws.
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When this legal melee began earlier this month, I guessed that the judge was simply taking IBM at its word and ordering Papermaster to stop work essentially at their whim. Well, you can’t blame me for underestimating the Judicial Branch, can you? Recently revealed records show that the judge had pretty solid reasoning for believing Papermaster was a serious threat to IBM in his new position at Apple, citing Apple’s interest in the man’s specific knowledge of microprocessors and the history between Apple and the Power processors to which Papermaster is related.

God, that’s all a bit dry, isn’t it? But it increases my faith in the court where this thing is being addressed; it also gives weight to IBM’s side of the argument — a non-comp agreement that Papermaster says is too broad. Unfortunately, his complaint may be a little too after-the-fact for the judge to consider it worthwhile.

I wish we had flashier legal issues to talk about, but all the ones I mention here aren’t quite as public. So, Papermaster it is!

We can jokingly say things like “buy a cellphone jammer to silence those annoying people on the bus” but that would be irresponsible. Quite irresponsible, it turns out, as criminals are now using such devices to impede law enforcement efforts.

It happened last month in Canada. Two Mounties had pulled over a car, and as they approached to car their radios went out. It turns out that the two guys inside the pulled over car had turned out one of those $200 eBay cellphone jammers, putting the officers at unnecessary risk.

This is a good time to remind y’all that using cellphone jammers is illegal in the U.S and most other places. In fact, a first time offender faces up to a $1,000 fine for using a jammer in the U.S.

Seems to me that an iPod is a much cheaper way to avoid hearing a fellow commuter’s conversation. And anyone who uses a cellphone at a restaurant should be promptly shown the door.

Good lord, sir. There are so many lawsuits about that you can’t swing a cat without hitting a lawyer. IBM is suing Papermaster, Papermaster is suing IBM, Apple and Psystar are suing each other, the US is suing LCD makers, Spansion is suing Samsung, and god knows what else just from the last couple weeks has escaped my memory.
And now Kodak is getting in on the feeding frenzy, and is suing Samsung and LG for undisclosed damages, saying their mobile phone cameras infringe on Kodak patents in some way. It’s a bit fuzzy right now, but I’d guess that Kodak pretty much has any sensor-related stuff locked down. Without knowing any of the details, I’m guessing LG and Samsung are going to cough up.

Papermaster doin’ it for his self! Well, his lawyers are helping. They’ve produced a somewhat scattershot countersuit against IBM, which if you don’t remember, sued the man for supposedly breaching a non-competition agreement in his contract. Papermaster’s corner says that not only is the non-comp clause “unreasonably broad,” but the statute of limitations is “unreasonably lengthy” and even if that weren’t the case, it’s “unenforceable” due to it being a part of NY law and Papermaster himself being bound only by Texas and California law.

To be honest, it’s pretty dry. I’m think I’ll leave this one alone for a while.

Yeah…a play on “Boston Legal” probably would have been better (and easier)
The ongoing drama between Apple and IBM in which would-be iPod and iPhone division head Mark Papermaster is charged with breaching a non-competition contract with IBM is getting more complicated. On the Apple side, it’s no great surprise to find out that he was considered rather a “long shot” in terms of everything but his technical knowledge. However, the search for an iPod head had been going on for so long that they were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel — or maybe it’s more charitable to say they were reaching the bottom of the cream and getting to the rest of the crop. At any rate, they offered him the job, which he decided to take. That’s when things get interesting.
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Such shameful conduct! It looks like from 2001 to 2006, LG, Sharp, and Chinese OEM Chunghwa were conspiring to keep the prices of LCD screens high and agreed on pricing floors to guarantee cash flow for everybody involved.

Over five years of first- and second-party sales (Dell and Apple were among the buyers), they must have run up quite a tab, although no one’s done the math yet. The companies have, however, been served with fines totalling $585 million between them ($400m from LG alone) — which amount, large as it appears, they can most certainly afford. Their reputation and business relationships may have been damaged severely by the legal proceedings, and perhaps in the coming OLED revolution, big retailers of LCDs may snub the companies, even though it’s likely every other supplier has similar predatory policies.
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A federal jury found yesterday that Samsung willfully infringed two of Pioneer’s patents covering plasma televisions. As such, the Korean electronics giant will have to cough up (“cough up” is the technical term, mind you) some $59 million, payable to Pioneer.

As you might expect, Samsung plans to appeal the ruling forever and ever.

Sorta interesting: a Japanese corporation taking a Korean corporation to an American court for redress. We’re so globalized!

French pirates may want to think twice about downloading that episode Entourage off the Pirate Bay. A new law just passed the Sénat that would cut file-sharers off the Internet. Those caught illegally sharing material, be it music, movies, software, or whatever else, will be warned, both by e-mail and regular mail. After two such warnings your connection is shut off.

Under the law, a new government body would be created to help patrol the France’s Internet use.

The law now has to be approved by the lower house of Parliament, the Assemblée nationale, which is directly elected by citizens.

There’s only one small problem with the proposed law: it directly conflicts with the wishes of all mighty Brussels, which has called such a measure—kicking people off the Internet for file-sharing—to be a violation of “civil liberties and human rights.”

Don’t mess with Brussels is the new Don’t mess with Texas.

Go ahead and read this court transcript. It’s a 35-page PDF of the London-Sire Records. Does 1-4 copyright infringement case. It’s the same song and dance you’re all familiar with: RIAA catches someone downloading a song, which entitles it to thousands upon thousands of dollars in remuneration. Only this time, the presiding judge, Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, actually recognizes the complete absurdity of suing these people so much money for downloading music. Some highlights:

• “There’s a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources. The law is also overwhelmingly on their side.”

• “I can’t say this is a situation that is a goof situation or a fair situation, it is , however, the situation.”

• “You know, it seems to me that counsel representing the record companies have an ethical obligation to fully understand that are fighting people without lawyers, to fully understand that, more than just how do we serve them, but just to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and that it’s terribly critical that you stop it…”

• “…that it was his son who did the downloading and his son has no assets, you’re getting water from a stone. What are you pursuing here?”

The whole thing is pretty tremendous.

Here’s what I don’t understand about all of this. Let’s say the RIAA catches me downloading a song. All of a sudden I owe them several thousand dollars for copyright infringement, right? Now, let’s say I walk into Best Buy and physically steal a copy of an album. Do I owe the RIAA thousands of dollars in that scenario? Because if copyright infringement=theft and theft=small fine, why is the RIAA suing these people for thousands of dollars? How does that make sense?

via Slashdot