Tiny Tablet Beheads a King
The European tablet market is going to get more crowded as a tiny Spanish tablet company has handed Apple a major legal defeat.
Nuevas Tecnologias y Energias Catala, based in Spain, has an NT-K tablet that Apple claimed infringes upon iPad patents. The lawsuit was started last year around this time when Apple sought to ban imports of the tablet into Spain — the tablet is physically manufactured in China.
A Spanish court removed the current injunction against the tablet, saying that there are no legal grounds to stop the sale of the NT-K.
The NT-K runs a Spanish-language version of Android that was written by the company’s programmers and only sold about 200 units because of its previous problems with the Apple litigation.
Nuevas Tecnologias will file a lawsuit asking for compensation for the losses it incurred from the injunction. The company expected to sell around 15,000 tablets in all of 2012.
HTC Wants to Negotiate Patents with Apple
HTC wants to negotiate with Apple over the companies’ patent disputes, HTC’s chief financial offer Winston Yung told Bloomberg.
Yung said his company is “open to having discussions” with Apple over its ongoing ITC complaints that began in March 2010 and had a recent ruling saying that HTC did indeed violate two Apple patents.
“HTC will vigorously fight these two remaining patents through an appeal before the ITC commissioners who make the final decision,” Grace Lei, general counsel for HTC, said at the time. “This is only one step of many in these legal proceedings.”
What’s likely to happen is a trade of sorts among patent licensing.
Apple was recently found to have been in violation of two patents owned by S3 Graphics. Mere days after that ruling, HTC purchased S3 Graphics for $300 million. Since all four patents are vital to each other’s operations and devices, a licensing deal covering all four seems very feasible.
“We are open to all sorts of solutions, as long as the solution and the terms are fair and reasonable,” Yung told Bloomberg.
On a related note, the HTC patent violations have given many pose over the trouble they could mean for all Android devices since they are at the heart of operations. If HTC can get approval for these patents it may be one of the few to secure a defense against any Android woes.
Grooveshark Says It Is a Purely Legal Service
US streaming music service Grooveshark is riled up after its app was abruptly — and reportedly without much if any notice — pulled from Google’s Android Market because of a complaint made by the RIAA.
Grooveshark has hit back by making its app available as a download from its Web site, as well as writing an open letter to the music industry published by Digital Music News.
“There does appear to be some confusion about whether Grooveshark is a legal service. So let’s set the record straight: there is nothing illegal about what Grooveshark offers to consumers,” wrote Paul Geller, executive VP of strategic development. Geller said that the confusion often comes from the difference between legal and licensed, saying “Laws come from Congress. Licenses come from businesses. Grooveshark is completely legal because we comply with the laws passed by Congress, but we are not licensed by every label (yet).”
Geller said that the company is in full compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that the piracy accusations are bogus. “We pay for our streams, and we actively negotiate with virtually every single content owner. We’ve taken down over 1.76 million files and suspended upload privileges to 22,274 users. These are not the characteristics of a company ‘dedicated to copyright infringement.’ As we work with artists and labels to make more content available to our users, Grooveshark becomes more competitive as an alternative to piracy.”
“In light of the recent misleading press concerning Grooveshark’s application,” said Geller, “it is important to make clear that we will defend our service, and the letter and the spirit of the law, in court and in Congress.”
14 Years of Reliable Reporting
Online Reporter is
a weekly research and analysis newsletter covering the digital media industry.
About Us
Editorial Sections
- Broadband Beat
- Cloud Computing
- DigiGrams
- Enabling Technology
- Home Networking
- Legal Matters
- Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics
- News
- Online Music Services
- Quote of the Week
- Sample Headlines
- Show Time
- Smart TV
- Stat of the Week
- Tablets
- Uncategorized