Tag: LEGAL

In news that will no doubt shake the very bedrock of your belief system, Apple has asked Toyota to remove its Scion theme and its advertising from ModMyi, a Cydia repository. The Scion theme has been available for weeks, but after it received a ton of press in the last couple of days, Apple finally lashed out. It's not like we should be surprised, considering Apple has claimed in the past ...

Can't stop gushing about your favorite new gadget or your latest album purchase? If you're posting about it on Facebook, there's a chance your words could wind up used by advertisers without your knowledge. Facebook has begun allowing companies to re-post endorsements from users as "Sponsored Stories," and there's no way for you to opt out at the moment. It's not all bad, though. Sponsored ...

I don't pay too much attention to Apple's App Store antics. I don't know the ins and outs of why they choose to approve App A and not App B. However, I do know that I'm a little surprised to see apps like Mog, Slacker, Rhapsody, and Spotify making their way onto the App Store. Why? Because it just seems odd that they'd want to allow those apps (which allow users to store tracks offline) to ...

Some people (including our own Victor Agreda Jr.) didn't understand why I was so shocked that Grooveshark's app had finally received Apple's blessing and showed up in the App Store. They had a pending lawsuit from one of the major record companies, after all. No matter, said Vic -- Apple doesn't concern itself with that stuff. It's up to the app developers to sort out those issues. ... Or is ...

Software licenses are about as enjoyable to read as subpoenas, and sometimes they're every bit as ominous. Still, every now and then there's something buried deep in the murky depths of that EULA you barely glanced at which is actually good to know about. Take this tweet from Microsoft Australia, for example. It offered an interesting insight that you might not have been aware of: any version ...

FriendDA is not even a website; it's just a single Web page, pre-formatted for printing. It's a form, that at first glance appears to be a standard NDA (or other legal form). But when you read past the first WHEREAS, the whole thing becomes much clearer. I quote: WHEREAS I possess a bright idea that I am choosing to disclose to you, The Advisor, with the mutual understanding that you are my ...

It's a story that beggars belief, a true case of Goliath smothering David with his voluminous backside, but believe it or not... it's true! Get this: a group of ingenious spammers are being sued by Microsoft for abusing Hotmail's Junk Mail Reporting Program and Smart Network Data Services. The lawsuit claims that the defendants used millions of Hotmail accounts to label spam messages as 'not ...

BitTorrent -- while loved by techies like you and me -- often gets a bad rap because of the assumption that it's only used to transmit illegal content like pirated software or cammed movies. There are, of course, loads of completely legal torrents floating around, but they're sometimes hard to find. Mininova underwent a rather forcible re-tooling last year and now serves legal content only. ...

Social networking giant Facebook just scored an intellectual property victory by patenting its News Feed, the constantly-updating stream of friends' activities that users see when they sign into the site. The patent, uncovered by AllFacebook, also includes News Feed features like advertising, filters, and searching the feed. The original application was filed by Mark Zuckerberg and half a dozen ...

BitTorrent is an extraordinarily useful technology that allows for more efficient sharing of perfectly legal things like Linux distributions. Nobody's denying, though, that it's most often used to download things like Modern Warfare 2 or the latest season of Heroes. The BitTorrent census, conducted by a Princeton University senior, confirms these suspicions. It turns out that the most heavily ...

... and I thought one online social suicide machine was enough, but I guess not: there's another site called Seppukoo and it's just been C&D'd by Facebook's crack team of lawyers. Facebook seems to be taking these 'virtual suicide' services rather seriously, and in a classic case of legalese-owns-you, Seppukoo is being smacked down for everything other than assisting suicide. Soliciting ...

It had to happen eventually -- I'm just shocked it took this long. Bing!, exclamation point not optional unless I also want to be sued, has filed a suit against Microsoft for confusing the public of St. Louis Missouri with its Bing (no exclamation point) search engine. It's the kind of news that warms me in both weird and wonderful ways. First, it reminds us all that capitalism is working as ...

Mininova, once the most popular torrent site on the web, has seen a monumental drop in traffic since it went legal last week. Without the lure of pirated movies, albums and software, folks are turning elsewhere for their torrent fix. (Hint, hint: not that we're condoning piracy, but feel free to use Download Squad's list of Mininova alternatives within the laws of your local jurisdiction.) ...

Yes, we've been over the App Store approval thing a hundred times already, but never quite like this. Apple's got a pretty strong policy when it comes to nudity, right? Right? So Beauty Meter - an application that allows, hypothetically, a fifteen year old girl to share a nude pic to be rated would be totally out of the question right? You'd at least expect there to be a nudity warning if you ...

I find it a little funny that TealPoint, makers of some truly awesome software for Palm's now-decrepit Operating Systems of days gone by, whipped out a launcher called TealOS that pretty much apes the WebOS that will supposedly "save" the bacon of the beleaguered handheld company. You know, Palm, the people who, after Apple dropped the ball, ran the PDA into the end zone back in the 90's? See, ...