February, 2012
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: (more…)
Tags: Automated privilege screen, Autosaves, Clawback, ESI stipulation, FRE 502, Google, Inadvertent production, Privilege, Privilege log, Privilege waiver, Privilege-review protocol
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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. (more…)
Tags: Patent
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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. (more…)
Tags: Google, Google Plus, Opt-out, Privacy
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