lawsuits
Nintendo Wins: DS R4 flash Cart Banned in Australia
Nintendo has won the legal battle against RSJ IT Solutions of Australia, the company that was making available for purchase R4 flash cart, a tool which enabled gamers to run homebrew on the Nintendo DS handheld. Following the court’s ruling RSJ IT now has to pay Nintendo $520,000 damage compensation. Besides that RSJ IT was ordered to stop selling the device using any of its sites (gadgetgear.com.au, for example).
Continue reading »Lawsuits: AT&T collects illegal taxes on Internet access
AT&T’s wireless unit has been hit by numerous federal lawsuits over the last month, each arguing that the mobile telephony giant is illegally collecting nonexistent “taxes” on phone data access plans. The cases have been filed in states as varied as Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama, but all make the same charges against AT&T—and all use the same idiosyncratic spelling of “I-Phone.” That’s because the same lawyers are involved in each one.
Continue reading »P2P Lawsuits Are Painful, Says Viacom Lawyer
Michael Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel, has recently talked to Yale Law students about P2P and its legal implications. While he declared himself as a fan of fair use without an appeal for the idea of filing lawsuits against file sharers, Fricklas is also a fan of DRM (which he thinks could be a feasible solution for online content rental and online streaming) and a supporter of the “three strikes” policy. As Arstechnica reports, Fricklas emphasized the importance of treating customers with respect as opposed to the feeling it gives you when bringing them to court which is like “terrorism.” In his speech at Yale he explained how suing end users for illegal file sharing was “expensive, and painful, and it felt like bullying.”
Continue reading »isoHunt and Why It’s So Successful
Ranked 199 by Alexa, isoHunt is a most prolific p2p file sharing site which managed in 6 years of existence to gain extreme popularity, gather millions of users, but also dodge lawsuits from copyright holders. The founder of the popular BitTorrent search engine, Gary Fung, has been interviewed recently by Computerworld in light of rumors about him hoping for a collaboration with the movie and the music industries. In the Q&A interview Fung also revealed some details about how he succeeded in keeping the site on the surface despite legal matters and his plans for his new ‘baby’ – another p2p site.
Continue reading »Game Released For Free on Torrent Sites by Its Developer
While complaints against piracy from the music and movie industries are pouring in daily, and book publishers as well as game producers are catching up with lawsuits and anti-piracy strategies too, others have adopted an entirely different approach. RedLynx, developer of Trials HD, a game you can quickly become addicted to, has decided to take matter into its own hands and be one step ahead of pirates – so, the company has voluntarily made its own game available on popular torrent sites. However, there’s catch – the version distributed for free on p2p networks was short of one key feature, namely – Leaderboard support, a feature which RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, called “the soul of the game.” The strategy is that the pirates would love the game so much as it is – without leaderboard – that they would want to buy the full version of Trials HD and enjoy all it has to offer.
Continue reading »