Federal Circuit Agrees with Oracle: Google’s Lindholm Email Is Not Privileged
In a Feb. 6, 2012 decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied Google’s petition for a writ of mandamus, rejecting Google’s efforts to overturn repeated rulings by Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu and Judge William H. Alsup (N.D. Cal.) that an internal Google email was not privileged. In a terse opinion, the Federal Circuit agreed with the lower court that Google had failed to make a “clear showing” that an email sent by Google engineer Tim Lindholm to Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin and a Google in-house attorney was protected by the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine. In re Google, Misc. Docket No. 106 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 6, 2012).
The Lindholm Email
The Aug. 6, 2010 Lindholm email has become a centerpiece in the Oracle v. Google Java/Android litigation as the parties appear headed for a trial as early as April 2012. In his email, Mr. Lindholm discussed technical alternatives to Java, observing: . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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East Texas Jury Invalidates Eolas’ “Interactive Web” Patents
While this is not a patent-litigation blog, I’d like to briefly mention a significant development out of East Texas involving patent claims that purported to cover some basic interactive features of what the late Sen. Ted Stevens described as that “series of tubes”. In a closely-watched patent-infringement trial, yesterday afternoon a federal jury in Tyler, Texas invalidated two patents — owned by the Regents of the University of California and licensed for purposes of infringement litigation to Eolas Technologies — covering the “interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”.
Eolas and the UC Regents filed suit in 2009 against Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Google and others, alleging that defendants infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 5,838,906 (the “’906″) and 7,599,985 (the “’985″). Plaintiffs claimed that the patents covered interactive Web pages and software that enables content to be interactively presented in or served to browsers through the use of embedded objects, including Adobe’s Flash and Shockwave, Apple’s QuickTime and Google’s Chrome for Windows. . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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Google Responds to Congressional Group’s Privacy Inquiry, Microsoft Launches Ad Campaign
On Tuesday, Google posted its formal response to the Jan. 26, 2012 letter from a bipartisan group of House members voicing concerns about the revised privacy policy Google announced on Jan. 24, 2012. In his Jan. 30, 2012 letter to the House group, Pablo Chavez, Google’s Director of Public Policy, stressed that the company would not be collecting any additional personal data from users and that users could control Google’s collection and use of their personal data in several ways – including by turning off their search history, accessing many Google products and services without logging in, and setting up multiple accounts to limit cross-product sharing. . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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Bipartisan Group of House Members Questions Google About New Privacy Policy, Stresses Need for Opt-Out Option
A bipartisan group from the House of Representatives sent a letter today to Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page asking that he answer a series of questions about the privacy changes Google announced earlier this week.
Google introduced its changes in a Jan. 24, 2012 post on the Official Google Blog titled “Updating our privacy policies and terms of service”, which began with a discussion of the merits of “shorter, simpler privacy policies” and went on to explain that “[o]ur new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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Supreme Court Rules Government GPS Tracking Is Fourth Amendment “Search,” Splits on Property vs. Privacy Rationale
In a significant decision involving privacy rights and digital data, the U.S. Supreme Court held on Monday that “the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, 565 U.S. ___ (Jan. 23, 2012).
In so holding, the Court affirmed the 2010 judgment of the D.C. Circuit reversing respondent Antoine Jones’ conviction on the grounds that the government carried out an unconstitutional search by using the GPS device in violation of the terms of the warrant the government obtained before installing the device. The Supreme Court did not rule on the reasonableness of the search, noting: “We have no occasion to consider this argument. The Government did not raise it below, and the D. C. Circuit therefore did not address it. . . . We consider the argument forfeited.” Slip op. at 12. . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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EPIC to FTC: Google Search + Google+ = Competition and Privacy Concerns
Hot on the heels of Google’s Jan. 10, 2012 introduction of “Search, plus Your World,” integrating the Google+ social network into Google’s search results, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to review Google’s changes, asserting in a Jan. 12, 2012 letter to the FTC that “Google’s business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s [2011] consent order.” Google’s modified search service, EPIC explained in its letter, will include
personal data gathered from Google+ in the results of users’ searches, including photos, posts, and business pages of users and their contacts. In addition to the personal information of a user’s contacts, search will also display Google+ business pages and notable Google+ users on the right-hand column of the results page.
In EPIC’s view, these changes “implicate concerns over whether the company prioritizes its own content when returning search results” and raise privacy concerns because . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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EPIC Asks FTC to Investigate Facebook’s “Timeline”
When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new Timeline feature at the company’s Sept. 22, 2011 f8 developer conference, he described it as “The story of your life . . . . All the stuff from your life.” According to a Sept. 22, 2011 Facebook Blog post,
The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click “Older Posts” at the bottom of the page. Again. And again.
. . .
With timeline [sic], now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff.
The Timeline announcement came toward the end of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into Facebook’s privacy practices, culminating in . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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Update on Google Books Litigation
Nine months after U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin’s March 22, 2011 decision rejecting the terms of a proposed class action settlement,1 there are renewed signs of life in the litigation brought against Google by a broad class of authors, publishers and related associations over the Google Books Library Project, Google’s plan to construct a huge digital library.
Two weeks ago, The Authors Guild and several authors filed a motion to certify a class . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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N.D. Cal. Relies on Federal Circuit’s Model eDiscovery Order to Craft Search Protocol Significantly Narrowing Third-Party Subpoena
Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal relied on the Federal Circuit’s recently-released model eDiscovery order for guidance in crafting a limited search protocol that significantly narrowed the terms of a subpoena served by plaintiff Software Rights Archive LLC (“SRA”) on non-party Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (“KPCB”). In re Google Litig., Case No. C 08-03172 RMW (PSG), 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 140656 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 7, 2011). . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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Federal Circuit Addresses eDiscovery Cost Recovery by Prevailing Parties
In a Nov. 23, 2011 decision that adds to the growing body of case law supporting the recovery of eDiscovery costs by prevailing parties under Fed.R.Civ.P. 54(d) and 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that although “the costs of producing a document electronically can be recoverable under section 1920(4),” the parties’ cost-sharing agreement precluded the prevailing parties’ claim for $234,702.43 of the $235,281.03 in costs they paid to Stratify for use of its ESI-review software. In re Ricoh Co., Ltd. Patent Litig. (Fed. Cir. Nov. 23, 2011). . . . CONTINUE READING . . .
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