Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

The Micro Persuasion blog is reporting that its content is being reproduced by two other blogs without permission, one of which is even running Adsense advertising in order to profit from the activity.

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While RIM suffered two legal setbacks last week (the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied RIM’s motion to enforce an agreement with NTP and also refused a RIM motion to stop the court proceedings in NTP’s patent lawsuit against it while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office re-examines NTP’s patents), this week it took a hit from Gartner Group when that organization issued a research brief alerting current and prospective enterprise RIM customers to “stop or delay all mission-critical BlackBerry deployments and investments in the platform until RIM’s legal position is clarified.”

Microsoft has been granted a patent on Method and system for providing service listings in electronic yellow pages.

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Infectious Greed comments on the USPTO’s annual report (pdf). It was another record year for patent.

Acacia Patent Acquisition Corporation, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation, has acquired rights to patents relating to Picture Archiving ang Communications Systems (PACS) (PDF) used in archiving and transmitting medical images from diagnostic imaging equipment such as MRIs and CTs. PACS enable multiple remote users to simultaneously access medical images from remote display terminals connected through data networks such as the Internet. They are commonly used by hospitals to acquire, archive, store and transmit medical patient image data for remote access by physicians located in other locations in the hospital, their private offices or from their home.

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ZDNet UK reported that:

The European Union is considering whether to force telecoms operators and Internet service providers to retain customer data for up to a year. On Wednesday afternoon, a parliamentary committee approved these plans, which will now be voted on by the EU Council.

While several governments want these requirements enacted in order to aid investigations into terrorism, the music industry is lobbying to allow this data to be used to investigate all crimes, including copyright violations. A number of groups, including The Open Rights Group, a UK digital rights organisation, are opposing such moves.

From ZDNet

The Lemelson-MIT Program has released an Inventor’s Handbook to address the independent inventor’s and aspiring entrepreneur’s most frequently asked questions regarding United States patents and hopefully to provide some helpful information on the patenting and commercialization processes.

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Research in Motion (RIM) believes it may have a work around the NTP patent with can be deployed by way of a software upgrade. RIM is apparently close to shipping the upgrade which, it believes, will free it from the threat of an injunction banning the sale of its Blackberry email devices in the US.

Sources: eWeek from Reuters | The Register