Posts tagged as:

intellectual property

My, how Google’s attitude has changed

January 26, 2012

Google, five months ago: “A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, [...]

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Apple reassures FutureTap: “We’re not making a patent claim on your work”

August 11, 2010

Remember the story about how Apple was stealing a third-party app developer’s work and patenting it? At the time, I explained in a long post that the patent was nothing to do with FutureTap’s excellent WhereTo? application. And, after consulting a patent lawyer who managed to get in touch with Apple’s patent lawyers, that’s exactly [...]

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In what way is slavishly copying something “original”?

August 1, 2008

Joseph Jaffe is generally great, but I really do have to pick him up on his post about how "Hasbro should change its name to Hasbeen": "Proof that you can’t keep a good Indian programmer down comes from the Agarwalla brothers, creators of the original and popular Facebook app (arguably the only one that actually [...]

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It’s not OK to steal content, even if you’re The Daily Mail

July 9, 2008

Back when I was a proper journo, I went on a course about media law. One of the basics – the very, very basic elements – was that all pictures are copyrighted and you are likely to get sued if you just grab one and use it. For photographers, pictures are their living and they [...]

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