BREAKING: Weev sentenced to 41 months followed by three years of supervised release.

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) March 18, 2013

Just moments before sentencing, Auernheimer (also known as Weev), was cuffed by court officers in a struggle over his tablet and phone. Auernheimer, who was not permitted to use computers with keyboards, was asked to surrender his devices, but tried to hand them to his lawyer.

“It looks like Andew got slammed into a desk by federal agents while trying to hand his phone to his lawyer after the court asked for his phone,” his publicist told me via email.

Auernheimer is, by all accounts, a controversial figure, which became abundantly clear in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) conducted yesterday.

He’s a founder of GNAA (Gay N*iggers Association of America), a group that probably has no actual gay or black members and seems, much as many other online trolling groups, to be devoted to causing as much online damage and destruction as possible. He’s also a member of Goatse Security, a grey-hat organization that focuses on finding and exploiting computer and website vulnerabilities. And he has done things online that most of us would consider morally reprehensible and ugly, if not precisely illegal, such as taking a leading role in the massive online harassment that caused usability expert Kathy Sierra to abandon the Internet.

But the specific charges that he was convicted of and has now been sentenced for seem tame by comparison. Essentially, he queried a public server with exactly the same kind of request your browser sent to the servers that run this website, aggregated the results, and sent them to a news agency, Gawker.

Auernheimer got a harder sentence than the #Steubenville rapists. One journalist equated the prosecution of hackers to the Red Scare.

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) March 18, 2013

The charges were based on the same law that federal prosecutors used against Matthew Keys, Aaron Swartz, and Stephen Watt: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which opponents have decried as vague and Swartz’s lawyers have said was misused by federal prosecutors to overly-aggressively pursue Swartz, who ended up committing suicide.

Auernheimer knows he is not exactly a lovable figure.

“I’m a nutjob from Arkansas,” he told me yesterday. “That’s any sane person’s perspective.”

But the question today is whether his exact actions in the AT&T case were illegal. And if they were, how many other actions of ordinary Americans are now being criminalized?

Auernheimer told me yesterday that he already plans to appeal the sentence, and the EFF is helping with the appeal.

photo credit: Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Daddy’s definitely not happy. And he’s not sure he trusts what junior’s telling him.

Yesterday U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal ordered Apple to not only turn over more evidence in an ongoing iPhone privacy case but also to explain — in detail — exactly how it obtained the data. Apple had previously been ordered to turn over documents that relate to how its iOS mobile operating system tracked users’ location data, even when location services were ostensibly turned off.

Apple failed to turn over all the required evidence, according to the judge. And, according to Bloomberg, Judge Grewal says he no longer trusts what Apple is telling him.

“Luckily for the plaintiffs, Apple has provided more than enough evidence itself to suggest to the court that it has not fully complied with the court’s order,” Grewal wrote. “In light of Apple’s performance in this case, the court cannot rely on its representations that this time it really has or will produce all responsive documents.”

The trend of judges getting unusually peeved with Apple seems to be growing. In the UK, Sir Robin Jacob told Apple to apologize to Samsung publicly for claiming that Samsung had copied its designs and forced the company to redo the apology several times until it was acceptable. (The same judge is now working for Samsung, believe it or not.) Unfortunately, the company seems to be getting a reputation in legal circles for not complying fully, or minimally complying, very slowly, to judicial orders.

Speaking of slow, the iPhone tracking issue and subsequent legal battle has been ongoing for two years now. Apple blamed software bugs for the large databases of cell tower and Wi-Fi hotspot locations that some users found accumulating on their computers. When the issue received public attention, Apple limited the records to a trailing seven days of data.

Slow is not going to cut it in this current case, however. Grewal has requested the data today.

photo credit: &y via photopin cc

A Dutch court has ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets do not infringe Apple’s design patents on its iPad tablet. This new judgement follows Apple’s UK spanking over the same issue, and the Dutch judge referenced the UK ruling in his judgement.

In a statement to Reuters, Samsung twisted the knife:

We continue to believe that Apple was not the first to design a tablet with a rectangular shape and rounded corners and that the origins of Apple’s registered design features can be found in numerous examples.

While Germany has proved kinder to Apple’s design lawsuits, European courts in general have not been sympathetic to the U.S. corporations’ claims. And with U.S. courts having denied Apple’s calls for Samsung important bans, you might think that now would be a good time to seek patent peace.

Especially since Samsung unilaterally dropped all patent lawsuits against Apple in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and, yes, the Netherlands.

Apple has of course already buried the hatchet with HTC over its Android phones, and Samsung has won the right to see many of the details of that agreement. Now if only Apple and Samsung could come up with something similar, we could report more actual technology stories and fewer riveting (not!) courtroom dramas.

photo credit: mac morrison via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Today, Samsung won a reversal of the sales ban on the Galaxy Nexus phone imposed after Apple’s August court win. Also today, Apple won at least a stay of execution on the iPhone and iPad sales ban imposed after Samsung’s August legal victory.

The first case is in the U.S.; the second is in Korea.

It’s getting hard to tell these patent infringement cases apart. By some counts, which may not be completely comprehensive, 19 lawsuits were ongoing between Apple and Samsung in nine different countries on four continents — last year. This year, with appeals, refilings, and potential new frontiers in different countries, the count may go even higher.

But at least we have patent peace in Antarctica.

Google hasn’t been selling the Nexus for a few months now …

The Samsung Nexus ban stemmed from Apple’s billion-dollar win in August in which a jury found that Samsung willfully infringed on the Cupertino, Calif., company’s patents. But as Reuters reported, the U.S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the California court had “abused its discretion in entering an injunction.”

I suppose that means Google will be selling the Nexus again at some point.

The iPhone/iPad sales ban stemmed from Samsung’s whopping $35,000 win in a Korean court that ruled Apple had infringed two of the Korean company’s patents, while Samsung had violated one of Apple’s. The bigger punch in that court decision, of course, was the threatened import ban, which Apple has now, at least, delayed.

Interestingly, the Korean court had also banned Samsung’s Nexus and Galaxy Tab tablets in a probably healthy “pox on both houses” attitude that could stand a visit to courthouses Stateside.

Both bans, and both reversals, will almost certainly face tests in further legal battles. Samsung will likely appeal its billion-dollar loss, and Apple must respond to the Korean ban, which has just been stayed, not lifted.

The soap opera continues. …

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Consider yourself preemptively re-served, Apple.

Samsung really, really wants everyone to know, even before the iPhone 5 hits the streets, that it is not yet attaching but is definitely planning to attach the iPhone 5 to its long-running court battle in U.S. District Court of Northern California.

At least Samsung had the good grace to wait until the phone was announced, unlike one Chinese company.

No, this is not the court battle it lost. This is another legal fight with Apple, which started in April of this year and is not scheduled to go to trial until March 2014.

This battle involves eight patents on data transfer, media syncing, touch screen technology, and more. Last night Samsung amended its complaint to include the iPhone 5:

“Samsung anticipates that it will file, in the near future, a motion to amend its infringement contentions to add the iPhone 5 as an accused product. On September 12, 2012, Apple announced that it will release the iPhone 5 on September 21, 2012. Based on information currently available, Samsung expects that the iPhone 5 will infringe the asserted Samsung patents-in-suit in the same way as the other accused iPhone models. Samsung plans to file a motion to amend its infringement contentions to address the iPhone 5 as soon as it has had a reasonable opportunity to analyze the device. Because Samsung believes the accused functionality of the iPhone 5 will be similar to the accused functionality of other accused Apple products, Samsung does not believe that amendment of its infringement contentions should affect the case schedule.”

There was no huge need to file last night, which makes me suspect that the timing of the announcement is part of Samsung’s campaign to disrupt Apple’s massive pre-sales ramp-up to iPhone 5 sales.

The iPhone broke all records in pre-selling two million units in its first 24 hours on sale. Fans — not necessarily of the saner sort — are already camping out for it, and U.S. sales alone could hit 50 million.

This court battle may be Samsung’s best bet to win against Apple after its billion-dollar failure, as two of the patents are FRAND patents. In other words, they are standards-essential, which theoretically means that no cellular communications device could be made without infringing on them.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung owns 99 percent of the world’s OLED market. This is one reason why, the company claims, Korean rival LG has been hiring its engineers and stealing its intellectual property.

So Samsung is suing LG in a Seoul court.

It might appear to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, considering Samsung’s recent loss in the iPhone patent case. However, this is a very different scenario.

According to the complaint, LG has been systematically recruiting key Samsung engineers, who are breaking noncompete employment contracts by signing on. As a Korean news agency states, Samsung claims that ”LG Display has consistently acquired our OLED technologies and other business secrets by inducing our researchers to transfer.”

Eleven people were indicted for stealing or improperly sharing Samsung’s corporate secrets in July, including a key engineer in Samsung’s development of AMOLED technology (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode).

With sales of OLED and AMOLED displays predicted to hit $44 billion in 2016, the battle is really about the future and who will own the bulk of that market. If Samsung can maintain its technology lead, it can effectively shut competitors — including LG — out of that business.

Samsung is demanding a billion won for each case of infringement, which is equivalent to about $900,000 U.S.

photo credit: khrawlings via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We haven’t seen a love-hate relationship like this since the Honeymooners.

Apple and Samsung are fighting tooth and nail in the market, together winning half of the global marketshare and 90 percent of the profit for smartphones.

And they’re mauling each other in court: 50 ongoing or filed lawsuits in 10 countries, including four in the U.S., 12 in Germany, one in the UK, two each in France, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Australia, and three in Spain.

But Apple and Samsung are also massive partners: Apple sources iPad screens, A5 chips for both iPhones and iPads, and DRAM chips for multiple products from Samsung factories.

And those components show up in close to 80 percent of Apple’s revenue. Last quarter, Apple sold $9 billion in iPads, $16 billion in iPhones, and almost $2 billion in iTunes store purchases, all out of $35 billion in total revenue. Without Samsung’s chips, or viable alternatives, CPUs, memory, and screens for all those mobile devices are lacking.

(I’ve included iTunes because without iPads and iPhones, there’s not a lot of point making app and music purchases, but I have not included any revenue from products such as the MacBook Air, which uses Samsung solid-state memory chips.)

In other words, Samsung is absolutely critical to Apple’s success — without its Korean partner, Apple could not deliver its products at the pricing and quality it is currently shipping.

But Apple is, in turn, massively important to Samsung: The Cupertino company is its single biggest customer.

Apple orders have been between $6 and $10 billion annually, and could hit $11 billion in 2012. In fact a single rumor — that Apple was sourcing memory chips from a Japanese provider — shaved $10 billion off Samsung’s market capitalization earlier this year.

I’m going to go out on a big fat limb here (feel free to cut it off in the comments!) and say we’ve never seen global business like this: great friends, horrible enemies.

The question is: Who needs the other more?

My money is on Apple needing Samsung more. With so much of its revenue tied up into products that Samsung manufactures critical components for, any serious interruption in the production flow would have enormous impacts. For Samsung, losing $10 or $15 billion in revenue would make for a very, very bad day (and a bad year), but would not be an existential crisis.

Ironically, the design-conscious California company that preaches total supply-chain integration is fighting a company that owns more of the supply chain. Samsung makes the components, but it also makes the finished products.

Long term, the company’s interests diverge. Samsung is and wants to be a global brand, not an anonymous manufacturer buried in someone else’s value chain.

Apple has got to be looking hard for alternatives.

Dotcom (pictured) and several other Megaupload employees were named in a 72-page indictment issued last Thursday by the Department of Justice. The indictment against Megaupload alleges it is connected to a vast criminal enterprise that has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company and its executives could serve many years in prison and forfeit $175 million in assets, including 15 Mercedes, a Maserati, a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce.

New Zealand Judge David McNaughton denied bail to Dotcom, saying he is flight risk. “With sufficient determination and financial resources, flight risk remains a real and significant possibility which I cannot discount and bail is declined,” Judge David McNaughton said, according to Reuters.

Dotcom has said he is innocent of charges and is not a flight risk because the government has seized his assets and because his wife is pregnant with twins. Dotcom will remain in custody until Feb. 22, when he will face an extadition hearing that could bring him to the United States for trial.

Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told VentureBeat this past Friday that the company would “be assembling a worldwide team of top-notch lawyers, intellectual property lawyers and tech lawyers to defend this. There’s a good chance Megaupload will prevail in this case.” Since then however, one of MegaUpload’s high-profile lawyers, Robert Bennett, has withdrawn, citing conflict of interest.

Sources close to the matter tell us the trial, which was previously scheduled to begin on October 31, had to be put off because of the judge’s full schedule, which includes a particularly thorny gang trial.

Also, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is still in the process of reexamining the patents and claims in question.

While many of us do not imagine the lawsuit will actually end in a trial but rather, as many corporate disputes do, in a settlement, the judge in the case had already ordered three mediation hearings. A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat today that all of those hearings have already taken place, and, as he said, “Nothing was settled.”

Google has been shown to be open to the idea of settling out of court. However, the search-focused company may actually be at some degree of fault — the operative word being “may.” And if Oracle can wrest prohibitive licensing fees out of Android sales, it might make a significant dent in the OS’s profit margins.

We asked our Google source whether the Android operating system itself was in danger of, at worst, coming to a premature close, as many consumers have worried throughout the initial findings of this lawsuit.

“Absolutely not. There’s no indication that Android is under threat,” said the Googler.

“From a consumer standpoint, consumers should not be concerned about losing their Android phone. But they should be concerned with the way in which Oracle is taking a platform they supported for years [the Java programming language] and is now trying to capitalize on our success.”

Oracle has owned and maintained the open-source Java language since its acquisition of former Java owner Sun two years ago. However, Android is also Java-based and has roundly crushed the Oracle-owned Java ME mobile OS. As you can imagine, that hasn’t gone over too well with Oracle, and the resulting lawsuit has raised massive questions about how intellectual property law comes into play when open-source software is on the line.

“We’re actively pushing back on Oracle to preserve choice in the marketplace in the long term,” said the Google rep, who repeated Google’s well-known intentions about keeping the Android operating system open-source.

Related articles

• Google’s patent plot thickens with new Microsoft lawsuit against Motorola Mobility (venturebeat.com)
• Google ups its Android patent defense with Motorola purchase (venturebeat.com)
• Sun Was Close to Licensing Java Patents to Google for $28M (pcworld.com)
• Oracle v Google: Ellison, Schmidt, and Page to take witness stand over Android (guardian.co.uk)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Korean electronics powerhouse Samsung on Monday confirmed it has filed a complaint against Apple in French courts on the grounds that the iPhone and iPad maker is violating three of its patents.

Samsung and Apple have been in a worldwide legal battle involving patent and copyright infringement since April when Apple sued Samsung in U.S. courts. Apple has claimed that Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphones and tablets “slavishly” copied the designs of the iPhone and iPad. Extensions of the infringement case have thus far made it to courts in the U.S., Europe, Australia and Korea.

The just-revealed French complaint was filed in Paris district court in July and the first hearing is expected to happen in December. Samsung told AFP that the complaint focuses on three technology patents and not design patents. Apple’s most recent tussle with Samsung in Germany focused on design patents.

Samsung’s French complaint asserts that Apple is violating patents regarding UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). The suit targets the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPad and iPad 2.

The most recent incident between the two companies was last week when a German court upheld a preliminary injunction that bans the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Samsung plans to continue the appeals process in higher courts in Germany.

Because Apple has had some success banning Samsung products in a few countries, it’s not hard to imagine the two companies coming to some sort of settlement. If such an agreement were to occur, Samsung would most likely have to pay Apple a fee per unit on certain mobile devices it manufactures.

What do you think about the ongoing war between Samsung and Apple?

Photo from Oldboy courtesy of Show East