A brief review of Nike’s history on matters of intellectual property will result in the impression that the company is a stalwart of IP protection. The company has been fond in the past of relying on intellectual property laws to take strong enforcement actions, even when the targets of those actions are laughably dwarfed by the company’s sheer size. Like many massive athletic apparel companies, it jealously protects its trademarks and patents. And, yet, it has been found in the past to be perfectly willing to infringe on the trademark rights of others.
The company, known for developing a variety of database software, filed a lawsuit in an Oregon federal court this week, accusing Nike of copyright infringement. Both parties have had a software license agreement in place since 2001, but during an audit last year, Qwest noticed that not all products were properly licensed.
“That audit revealed that Nike had deployed Quest Software Products far in excess of the scope allowed by the parties’ SLA,” Quest writes in their complaint, filed at a federal court in Oregon.
In addition, Quest says the audit revealed that Nike was using pirated keys and cracked versions of Quest software to route around paying for the full licensing costs it would otherwise be obligated to pay. Those types of actions aren’t the sort of accidental infringement we’ve come to expect at large companies like Nike. Instead, they constitute a willful attempt to not pay for the software in use.
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Categories : Copyright, Digital Rights Management, Software Piracy
[ed notes: This ruling/case could be ENORMOUSLY important in the open source v proprietary software space]
The Federal Circuit recently decided the case of Oracle America v. Google Inc. To “attract Java developers to build apps for Android,” Google copied the declaring code, but wrote its own implementing code for the 37 Java API packages. Id at 1187. Previously, the Federal Circuit held that “[the] declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization (‘SSO’) of the Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection.” . On the other hand, the Federal Circuit also recognized that a reasonable jury could find that “the functional aspects of the packages” are “relevant to Google’s fair use defense.” In this key decision that has the potential to rock the software industry, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the jury verdict and found that “Google’s use of the 37 Java API packages was not fair as a matter of law.
eSports is an exciting new area — not only in the sporting industry but in legal terms. There are various key players such as eGamers, game publishers, and organizers of eSports events, who are facing the challenge of sufficiently protecting their rights. Organizers need to ensure that they obtain all necessary usage rights from the game publishers and the participating eGamers, and these parties need to be aware of their possible ancillary copyrights and should take appropriate precautionary measures to protect them.
In a new development in an important scraping dispute, LinkedIn appealed the lower court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction compelling LinkedIn to disable any technical measures it had employed to block the defendant’s data scraping activities. LinkedIn’s brief was filed on October 3, 2017. In it, LinkedIn asserts that the relevant issue is whether the lower court “erred as matter of law by holding—contrary to the CFAA’s unambiguous text and Circuit precedent—that LinkedIn could not invoke the CFAA after LinkedIn revoked hiQ’s access to its servers by sending a particularized cease-and-desist letter and imposing technical measures to block hiQ’s data-scraping bots.”
We will be watching the developments in this case closely.
Given the growth of efficient infringement, Google can operate in an open innovation way, applying open source principles to patented technologies from outside of the company as well as from those inside the company and partners… If it were not for efficient infringement it would be impossible for one company to be involved in as many different areas of endeavor as Google/Alphabet have attempted. The only feasible way for them to hunt for the next revenue stream seems to be to scatter-shot innovation by going in numerous different directions without any real focus. Of course, that requires them to ignore the rights of others and pretend we live in an open source world without any patent rights. Ironically, it is this disparate and uncoordinated approach to innovating that is also preventing Google from developing any kind of mastery outside of their core search competency and revenue generating model.
A German maker of 3D virtual reality software is accusing the US Navy of engaging in wanton piracy, and we’re not talking about piracy on the high seas. This is about digital piracy of software, according to a federal lawsuit brought by Bitmanagement Software. The company is seeking copyright infringement damages of more than $596 million (€543 million) from the Navy for allegedly stealing more than 558,000 copies of its BS Contact Geo software.
The amount of damages, if the Navy loses, could go up substantially. Bitmanagement also noted that, in addition to licensing fees, it is seeking pre- and post-judgement interest, punitive damages, legal costs, attorney fees, and statutory damages that could amount to $150,000 per infringement.
According to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in the US Court of Federal Claims:
We blog pretty much every scraping case we see; we just don’t see many of them. As I’ve told you before, scraping is ubiquitous but of dubious legality. Today’s case reiterates just how hard it is for scrapers to win in court if challenged.
The case involves competitors in the online coupon industry. The facts alleged by the plaintiff look very typical for competitive scraping. CouponCabin alleges that Savings.com and several other sites scrape offers from its site, either on an automated or manual basis. In response, CouponCabin allegedly deployed technological blocks against “all traffic, including legitimate users, emanating from certain cloud computing providers and internet service providers identified as being used particularly heavily by the Defendants to conduct scraping activities.” CouponCabin also allegedly sent cease-and-desist letters to most of the defendants. Despite the technological blocks and demand notices, CouponCabin alleges “the Defendants knowingly and intentionally circumvented [the Plaintiff’s] security measures in order to continue their data scraping activities.”
On Friday, an Oculus Runtime update blocked a fan-made workaround that had let HTC Vive owners play previously Rift-exclusive software. At the time, Oculus said the update wasn’t targeted at the workaround, and was instead trying “to curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make.” Now, though, Oculus’ move has encouraged the patch’s developer to break Oculus’ digital rights managements entirely, potentially opening VR software up to piracy as well as hardware freedom.
. . .
Breaking the DRM entirely is now the now the only way to break Oculus’ hardware check, LibreVR writes on Reddit. “The problem is that Oculus added the check for the Rift being attached to your PC to the actual DRM. They now use the same function to check that you own the game and that you have the headset,” he said. “I can’t disable one check without disabling the other one too. Previously these checks were separate and the DRM would only check whether you owned the game.”
New research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that Spotify has helped to reduce the level of piracy in the countries where it is available. The work also reveals that Spotify reduces the number of digital track sales, but that those losses are cancelled out by the licensing fees paid by Spotify.
The researchers Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel obtained the weekly levels of digital sales and of piracy via torrents for 8,000 artists for the time period 2012-2013. Combining this with data from Spotify, the researchers were able to establish two interesting results. As a post on TorrentFreak puts it: “Based on this data the researchers conclude that Spotify has a clear displacement effect on piracy. For every 47 streams the number of illegal downloads decreases by one.” That may not sound like much, but given the large numbers of Spotify streams, the effect on piracy is observable.
A newly published patent application filed by Sony outlines a content protection system that would use small RFID chips embedded on game discs to prevent used games from being played on its systems, all without requiring an online connection. Filed in September and still awaiting approval from the US Patent Office, the patent application for an “electronic content processing system, electronic content processing method, package of electronic content, and use permission apparatus” describes a system “that reliably restricts the use of electronic content dealt in the second-hand markets.”
