A group of U.S. Senators have introduced a new bill that will allow cellphone owners to legally unlock their devices again after their contract has expired.
Called the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, and backed by Al Franken and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the bill would reverse a Library of Congress ruling from October 2012 that deemed cellphone unlocking illegal unless the process was performed by a carrier.
The [Read More...]
As of January 26th, it is now illegal for you to unlock your smartphone if you want to use it on another network. Carrier unlocking has been legal in the U.S. for years, but in October the Library of Congress ruled that unauthorized unlocking is a crime.
The Obama Administration has already voiced its opinion that citizens should be allowed to unlock their smartphones without risking criminal penalties, and a senator from [Read More...]
Apple has a well documented history of banning everything that has anything to do with pornography, even if it’s only remotely related. It’s nice that Apple wants to keep the App Store clean, but their obsession with eliminating porn from computing has a lot of collateral damage.
In its latest push to get porn off your computer, Apple now deletes all iCloud emails that contain the phrase ‘barely legal teens.’ [Read More...]
Apple has a well documented history of banning everything that has anything to do with pornography, even if it’s only remotely related. It’s nice that Apple wants to keep the App Store clean, but their obsession with eliminating porn from computing has a lot of collateral damage.
In its latest push to get porn off your computer, Apple now deletes all iCloud emails that contain the phrase ‘barely legal teens.’ [Read More...]
A petition against a phone unlocking ban that was introduced last month has now received more than 100,000 online signatures, the threshold petitions must reach to get an official response from the Obama Administration. The petition calls for the White House to make cellphone unlocking legal again, without having to go through a carrier.
Back in October 2012, the Librarian of Congress decided that the process of unlocking a cellphone via a [Read More...]
Continuing a new trend among senior executives, Apple’s general counsel has joined the Board of Directors at Vail Resorts, a ski resort company with locations in Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming. Bruce Sewell currently serves as Apple’s “general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Government Affairs. Believe it or not, he worked as a professional ski patroller during his college years.
“In his role at Apple, Mr. Sewell oversees all legal matters, including [Read More...]
Seriously, guys?
In one of the more visually hilarious moments in the current legal wrangling between Samsung and Apple, Samsung has submitted parts of Apple’s deal with HTC to the judge involved in the Samsung v Apple case.
Notice anything weird about it? The document is seriously worked over by some paralegal’s Sharpie.
Granted, not all of the 143 pages in the document are marked out, but there are a lot of [Read More...]
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Apple a patent covering vertical and horizontal UI scroll bars. Yes. Apple has a patent on scroll bars. Patent No. 8,223,134 for “Portable electronic device, method, and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents” covers the implementation of transparent and disappearing vertical scroll bars in essentially everything. These are the same bars that appear when scrolling any webpage, playlist, and any type of “digital document” that cannot be fully [Read More...]
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act prevents people from circumventing digital rights management and other technological measures used to protect copyrighted material. However, DMCA, just like the much talked about SOPA, has its fair share of loopholes and possible abuses companies and governments can levee against consumers. Every three years the U.S. Copyright Office holds a “rulemaking” meeting to consider granting exemptions to the DMCA in an effort help prevent harm from being caused to “legitimate non-infringing [Read More...]
Apple’s legal eagles aren’t letting much grass grow beneath them in 2012 when it comes to going after the software pirates who continue to cost the iOS App Store and its developers large sums of money.As it’s being reported right now across the blogosphere, Apple is distributing legal takedown notices to the servers hosting at least one well-known service that assists users in illegally procuring software from the App Store.Although the latest efforts by Apple aren’t elusively [Read More...]
