The claim comes from an attempt he made to change the terms of his Xbox live contract.  On May 6th this year he sent a message to Microsoft saying that he was “unilaterally amending the terms of service” of his contract.  His claim was that if Microsoft did not cancel his contract within 10 days it would have to accept his new terms.

The reason for this is seemingly to get back at the company for introducing new terms and conditions for customers on a periodic basis, a practice that is very common in modern business.  When this happens if the customer doesn’t respond, which nobody ever does, it is assumed they have accepted the terms.

In his new terms he introduced a “forfeit victory clause” in which Microsoft would have to pay him $500 billion dollars in damages in it didn’t respond within 24 hours of the ‘new’ contract taking effect.

This is not the first time that Stebbings has tried to pull a fast one.  The Seattle PI, which broke the story, did a search on the US federal legal database and found “more than a dozen claims within the past year.  In some of them, he alleged discrimination by companies – including Walmart – that refused to hire him…Many of the cases were quickly dismissed.”

His claim has very little chance of ever being heard by a court and I very much doubt that Microsoft’s lawyers will be worried in the slightest.

When Seattle PI asked Stebbins why he was bothering, or words to that effect, he told them “My true goal is not to just harass, and it’s not just to get rich. My true goal is to level the playing field.  I’m trying to give employees, consumers, and generally, people who’ve been economically disadvantaged a new, powerful tool to protect themselves. Who needs to go crying to Congress for more workers’ rights and consumer protection laws?!  We can do it all ourselves! How’s that for a motive you can get behind?!”

Stebbins wouldn’t be the first person on the planet to be fed up with big business, only two days ago I wrote an article here on gHacks asking if “Patent Tennis“, the gentle art of companies slinging patent lawsuits back and forth that is slowly eroding consumer choice, hasn’t already gone too far.  After the global economic downturn it’s understandable that many people will be resentful of companies that make enormous profits when others are struggling to find work or pay the mortgage.

However while some might consider his attempt valiant, others would more likely consider him foolish, especially in a statement he made when asked if he would be submitting full documents to a court.  He scornfully replied that he “will not be presenting any exhibits in paper format. To do so would put an undue strain on my printer.”

According to Seattle PI the Xbox Live contract doesn’t say it can’t be amended by a customer, though this is unlikely to get him anywhere.  Microsoft’s lawyers normally have every angle covered, and then some (believe me, I’ve worked with them and they can be a right pain for this!)

Stebbins admitted though that it was probably unlikely that the expansive legal department at Microsoft HQ in Redmond would even have seen his claim, saying “I mean, think about it: When I mail these documents to Microsoft, they won’t go to any legal division; I arranged for the mailings to be picked up by the employee that just collects regular mail! It’s quite possible that these employees won’t understand the legal significance of these documents, and know that they’re required to respond.”

Via NeoWin

In the documents reported on today by Cnet, Apple is trying to ban, so it would seem, every Samsung smartphone and tablet product including the Galaxy Ace, Galaxy S, Galaxy SII smartphones and the Galaxy Tab 7 and 10.1 tablets.

The complaint demands that Samsung also recall all unsold stock from resellers in the country “within 14 days” because that stock is infringing Apple’s intellectual property.  In the suit Apple say…

“For the record, we mention the fact that by the stock, the offering and/or  selling said Galaxy smartphones [and tablets, red], infringes the intellectual  property of Apple Inc.,”

Cnet asked Samsung for a statement and they replied…

Samsung will continue to actively defend and protect our intellectual property  and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communication  business.”

Earlier in the month Apple was granted a preliminary injunction in Germany banning the sale of the Galaxy tab 10.1 across almost the whole of the European Union.  That sales ban was lifted this week.  The current ruling allows sales to continue until Samsung and Apple meet in court on August 25th.

The source of the problem appears to be Google’s Android operating system, which Microsoft has also taken issue with over patents.  Google appeared to be in such a rush to get Android out of the door that they allegedly trampled on a few patents owned by their competitors.  However the actual evidence of this is embroiled in legal complications.

Whatever the current situation it is becoming clear that consumers are growing tired of the endless patent battles between the big technology companies over smartphones and tablets.  What consumers want is choice and a good selection of quality products.  It’s very clear that patent squabbles are fuelled by nothing more complicated than money, profit and shareholders dividend payments.  These are things the average man and woman on the street care little about.

There have been discussions previously about the physical resemblance of some Samsung Galaxy phones to the iPhone, though let’s be honest there are only so many shapes and styles a phone can be, and there are only so many materials they can be made from and so many factories equipped to do so.

It is inevitable therefore that some smartphones and tablets will go on sale looking and operating very similarly to one another.  This again isn’t something that consumers care about.

Ultimately Apple, who some commentators have been reporting for a couple of years seems to be heading down a course that will lead them into anti-trust battles with the US government and the EU, don’t seem to care about anything other than the consumer getting an Apple product.  The fact that there are more than enough consumers of technology on the planet to keep all the major shareholders in the big technology companies in absolute luxury seems to be unimportant.

At the moment the question probably needs to be asked if the gentle art of “Patent Tennis”, whereby technology companies lawyers justify their ludicrous salaries by constantly throwing lawsuits back and forth, isn’t getting out of hand.  Android is a major target at the moment with Microsoft already collecting a $10 ‘patent tax’ on every unit sold.  The only losers in all of this will be Google’s Android operating system and the people who want to use it.

Make no mistake the big guns have got it in for the open-source upstart, and they seem determined to destroy Android at whatever the cost.

The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in U.S District Court of Massachusetts. The NAD feels that Netflix has violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captions for most of its “watch instantly” move and television content.

There are over 36 million Americans alone who are deaf or hard of hearing. According to the National Association of the Deaf, many of these people have already brought this issue to the attention of Netflix by sending letters, writing blogs and signing petitions that urge the site to provide equal access to its streaming content. The group says that Netflix, despite all of the complaints and requests by NAD members, has so far only set up captions on a small number of the overall titles on its “watch instantly” service.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that “places of entertainment” provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities, says NAD. They are asking the court to declare Netflix in violation of the Act and are hoping the court orders the company to provide captions on all streaming content. NAD President Bobbie Beth Scoggins made this statement:

“We have tried for years to persuade Netflix to do the right thing and provide equal access to all content across all platforms. They chose not to serve our community on an equal basis; we must have equal access to the biggest provider of streamed entertainment. As Netflix itself acknowledges, streamed video is the future and we must not be left out.”

There is some question as to whether or not Netflix has truly been ignoring this community’s need and it should be interesting to see what comes to light during this case. In a blog post back in February (long before the lawsuit), Neil Hunt, the company’s chief product officer, said that about 30% of the streaming content available at Netflix had subtitles available and that he expected to see an increase of up to 80% by the end of this year. Much earlier, in a blog post from 2009, Hunt had suggested that there were technical difficulties challenging their progress with subtitles.

The NAD lawsuit contends that the process of captioning is both technically possible and relatively simple to achieve.
It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on this case. Netflix is not a traditional “place” such as a video store you can walk into or a theater. So does it constitute a place of entertainment under the law? Netflix is an online business and one has to wonder if the courts will rule that it comes under the jurisdiction of the ADA or not. Either way, one certainly hopes they endeavor to make all of their products easily accessible to the NAD community.

Microsoft are also taking Apple to court over the name “App Store” claiming that it’s a generic term and they should be able to use it for the Windows Store should they want to.

These are two examples of the madness that’s been going on in the last couple of days with tech companies and litigation.  Sony are effectively saying, “our product isn’t secure enough and you’re to blame for that, not us” and Microsoft, frankly, are perfectly correct in their assumption of generality.

Let’s take the Microsoft / Apple case first.  There are a great many terms in the world that fall into this generalisation category.  UK technology firm Psion famously sued over the term “Netbook” a couple of years ago because they had released a computer previously with that name back in 1999.  They lost, and rightly so.  A netbook is a net enabled book-sized thing.

The fact that Apple have popularised the App Store concept means, as they can expect, that every other technology company will jump onto the bandwagon.  The company couldn’t possibly claim to hold onto exclusive use of such a ‘foggy’ trademark name in such a broad market.  Not in the way they can with a specific product name such as iPod.

Apple on the other hand have sued other companies for using the letter i at the beginning of their product names.  This has even included products that were around for years before the first iPod appeared.  Is this right and should it be allowed?

This brings me back to Sony who are using their corporate size and money to push responsibility for their security problem onto a party of hackers, because hackers can be seen as an easy target.  The group responsible for the hack, fail0verflow, have said that ”We have never condoned, supported, approved of or encouraged videogame piracy.  We have not published any encryption or signing keys. We have not published any Sony code, or code derived from Sony’s code.”

They also claim they only broke the code so that people could run their own legitimate code on the console if they wanted to.  But what is a crime?  Surely it would be a crime if they took Sony’s code and used it in their own products.  Is simply finding out what Sony’s code is a crime?  Many people would think not.

Now I’m not going to get into any guessing game over who is right or wrong as  fail0verflow will have to prove their claims but it still boils down to the fact that Sony’s security simply wasn’t good enough.  There is security in other products that’s never been cracked and other companies have means of patching security holes as and when they appear.  Who’s fault is this?  Is this the fault of a group of hackers?

The litigation situation with large technology companies is getting out of hand, especially when there are so many thousands of products on the market that are all so similiar to one another and that all do the same thing.  Xerox, if it wanted to, could probably take Microsoft, Apple and Linux to court for copying their first windowing GUI way back in the 1980′s.  They’d definitely lose though because GUIs are now generic and everywhere, even on your phone.  Microsoft couldn’t sue Apple or the Linux community either for using windows on their desktops because windows on a computer have now become a generic thing.  Such lawsuits would be laughable.

So come on guys, put your hands up and admit to your own problems and don’t try to cling onto pointless patents anymore.

Several GMail users who were affected by the glitch sued Google over privacy issues, saying that their personal privacy had been violated by Google becausr they were not offered an option to prevent others from seeing their personal contact details.

The payout will go to seven GMail users, each of who will received $2,500.  30% of the payout will be paid for legal fees.  The remainder will be split between several organisations that promote and campaign for better online privacy.

A condition of the settlement requires Google to better educate its users about online privacy.  The full settlement is awaiting approval from the federal court.

The Buzz service was changed following a rash of privacy complaints to prevent users from automatically being able to see the contact details of everyone they were connected to.  The entire service no longer exists online as the beta was dropped last month.

First of all, what if your name was Daniel Mannheim? Could they sue you for using your own name? Also, the Twitter account is not abused, or used in any way to undermine the city, and even if it were, we have freedom of speech, so still!

Second of all, if they actually win this, imagine the barrage of lawsuits against people who have legally and properly registered a cool name. Could my brother (Martin) sue the founder of this blog if he used “Martin” as a username on Twitter? Would there be a lawsuit with 20,000 people in a deathmatch, everyone against everyone? I’m sure the lawyers would have fun.In addition, this would spread to Facebook, Google accounts, Yahoo accounts, and the rest of the world, taking down more than a few genuinely great twitterers and bloggers.

Personally, I think the city just wants the name, and tried a threat in the hope that it will work. I don’t think they stand any chance of winning this, so they will probably back down if Mark Zondler refuses to let go of his name. What do you guys think, who is right here, will there be a lawsuit, and if so, who stands to win and why? Get your legal hats and start commenting!

I don’t intend to start a debate on whether or not it’s the right course of action but it does bug me when innocent people get pulled up for something they did not do. And that’s exactly what happened to an elderly couple in the UK recently.

The couple, in their 50s were stunned to receive a letter from a UK-based law firm called Davenport Lyons, accusing them of uploading an Atari game. The letter demanded a compensation fee of 500 pounds as well as additional 25 pounds for copyright infringement. Of course, the crime was identified by tracing the IP address involved back to these people.

The victims vehemently denied the charges and yes, they were able to back it up. They did not own the game in question nor was any trace of P2P or other file-sharing software found on their computer. Neither did they have WiFi access so it’s unlikely that someone else hacked into an unsecured connection.

Thanks to the intervention of consumer group Which? Computing, the charges against these people were dropped. However, no one’s answering the most important question: how did they get hold of the victim’s IP address?

One theory is that it’s simply a goof-up. The other is that Atari decided to set an example and didn’t care who they targeted. What do you think of this situation? Is it justified? Let me know in the comments.