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.

So, the RIAA decided to sue Allofmp3 for the enormous sum of 1.65 trillion dollars. Yes that is right guys, it is not million, nor billion – it is trillion. How did they come up with this amount of money ? They took a look at the sales of allofmp3 and came up with the figure of 11 million mp3 sales in about 6 months. They then decided to multiply this number by 150000 (which is the maximum amount chargeable by law) and came up with the number.

Will the RIAA finally be able to knockout the underdog ? Even if the RIAA wins this case it won’t have an effect on the Russian mp3 site because it would only affect them if they would run their business from the United States. As long as they don’t come stateside they are probably on the safe side.
I personally think that is is ridiculous to demand $150000 for every single song that has been downloaded from the allofmp3 website. The proportions get way out of line here.

Now. What would you do ? Would you fight for the chance to win this uphill battle risking everything you got in the course of it ? Or would you give in although you might have every right to link to those websites and shows ? It is indeed a difficult question and I’m really not sure how I would react if I would face such a situation.

Would you personally say that linking to a movie on youtube for instance is illegal if the movie itself has been illegally uploaded to the site ? Would not it make more sense to sue youtube instead – they are hosting the content. So, why didn’t they sue google instead ? Could it be that google has enough money to hire some lawyers who would defend their site ? Could it be that Fox is not interested in a ruling at all ?

The same tactics can be witnessed when RIAA lawyers sue people. Most can’t afford lawyers and do what the RIAA lawyers tell them. The people that fight the ruling normally win and the RIAA backs out.

The main question however is the following: If it is indeed illegal to link to illegal content why aren’t they suing the search engines ? What if a website changes content and has now something illegally on their site ? Do webmasters have to check all the sites that they link to every day to make sure there is nothing hosted on them that could get them in trouble ?

Where will this end ? Can they sue me if I talk to someone in person and tell him that he should search for Simpsons on youtube to find and watch the latest episodes ? What if someone does not link directly to the shows but to a search results page ? Still illegal ? What if he writes down the name that his visitors should search for and links only to the main address of the video hosting site ? Still illegal ?

Where does it end ?