Law
Jury orders Samsung to pay US$1 billion in damages to Apple
The jury in a landmark intellectual property lawsuit has ruled that Samsung should pay Apple over US$1 billion in damages. After nearly 22 hours of deliberation, the jury found that Samsung willingly infringed upon Apple's patents with a number of its devices. Apple was not found to have infringed upon any of the South Korean firm's patents. Read More
A new law came into effect in the U.K. this past weekend which requires U.K.-based websites to receive consent from visitors before using cookies to store tracking information about them. Though the law originally called for visitors to explicitly opt-in with the use of a checkbox or similar method, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), an independent privacy watchdog, backpedaled just 48 hours before the law was to come into force and watered down the legislation to allow "implied consent" - in other words, websites can assume users have already consented to the use of cookies. Read More
Cellphones play an obvious role in dating, meet-ups, and generally keeping in touch ... but they also have an increasing role to play in our breaking apart. Data snaffled from smartphones is flourishing as divorce evidence, and on the other side of the ledger, apps exist to help in the process of hanging up marital connections - there are apps to initiate, manage and survive a divorce as well as apps for assessing the costs and scheduling time with kids afterwards. Read More
A number of high profile websites are going dark today to protest the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The bills are designed to protect intellectual property holders by toughening measures against copyright infringers. Opponents say that aspects of the bill pose grave threats to free speech and internet entrepreneurship, with some high profile webmasters claiming that the bill, if passed, would threaten the very existence of their sites despite not hosting copyright-infringing material directly. Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing are among the sites effectively shutting down today. Read More
