Law and Innovation

Fresh and interesting article posted on the IPKat IP Blog about the introduction in Spain of a new intellectual property legislation that will charge the free Google News service for showing snippet from  Spanish publishers  publications. As a result, Google will remove Spanish publishers from this service, and close Google News in Spain. Happy Reading! "IPKat readers will remember that last year Germany introduced an   ancillary right  that grants press publishers the exclusive right to exploit their contents commercially for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators from displaying non-insignificant excerpts of newspaper articles without paying a fee.  As explained  here , the German initiative was aimed at recouping  some of the revenues that traditional news publishers have lost to the web. The underlying idea was also that news aggregators like Google News would not really boost visits to newspaper webs...

Fresh and interesting article posted on < Re/Code > about the first of a series of discussions (hosting by Google) on how one person's right to be forgotten should be balanced with the public's right to information, following a May 2014 court ruling that reinforced Europeans' "right to be forgotten". The discussion is streamed online at: https://www.google.com/intl/en/advisorycouncil/ Happy reading and discussion! "A panel appointed by search engine Google will hold the first of a series of meetings on Tuesday to debate the balance between privacy and the free flow of information after a May court ruling reinforced Europeans’ “right to be forgotten”. The event in Madrid will be the first of seven meetings in European capitals, as the Internet giant struggles with thousands of requests a month to remove from its search results everything from serious criminal records, embarrassing photos, instances of ...

Fresh and interesting article posted on The Vancouver Sun about a unique of its kind worldwide site blocking injunction against Google. More precisely, a Canadian court has ordered Google to completely block a group of websites from its worldwide search results (and not just "Google.ca"). The ruling was handed down despite Google's protestations that the court has no jurisdiction over Google locally or in the United States. Happy reading! "A B.C. Supreme Court decision ordering Google to block a company’s websites from its search engine results around the globe could have even more sweeping implications than Europe’s so-called “right to be forgotten” ruling, according to Internet legal experts. In the case of Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack, the court granted an interim injunction ordering Google to block websites associated with a company selling products in contravention of court orders. Google is appealing the decision, which was released Frida...

Fresh and ( very) interesting  article posted on Wired about the imminent future of wearable technologies.  Happy reading!  "Data will not help you if you can’t see it when you need it. For Dan Eisenhardt—a competitive swimmer for more than a decade, beginning as a 9-year-old in his native Denmark—the data he needed in the water, what he could never know in the water, was his splits. His event was the 1,500-meter freestyle, the longest slog in the sport, a near-mile of grinding exertion divided into 15 laps of 100 meters apiece. As with every distance sport, pacing is all; lag your target time on the first two laps and you may never catch up, but accidentally beat it and you’ll load your tissue with lactic acid, doom your endgame. How fast was his last lap? How did it compare to his usual pace? His coach up on the pool deck could know, his parents in the stands could know. But Eisenhardt, at war in the water, could only guess. The rigors of engineering school e...

Fresh and interesting article : There’s no such thing as a stupid question… Although this question may seem to be targeting just a few companies desiring to build a device compatible with a given Android version, it may also give you a short overview on how Google is using Android as a trademark.  As you can read on Wikipedia, Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, in October 2003, by 4 persons: Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger), Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.), Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile), and Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTV). [1] In November 2007, just a few months after the original and revolutionary iPhone came out [2] , the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was announced. On September 23, 2008 the current leading smartphone platform in the world was launched as an open source project. As you know, Android falls into two categories: the open parts from the AOSP, which are the foundation of Andro...