Articles tagged Legal
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
166 Investigations, 36 Convictions: Taiwan’s Six-Year Hunt for Hidden Chinese Chip Labs
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News,
In the spring of 2020, a 32-year-old chip designer in Hsinchu took what looked like a great job. The company, Blue Ocean Smart System, was American. The work was an ambitious AI chip design project. The salary was $120,000, roughly double the Taiwanese industry average, enough to cover private elementary school for his two kids. Then he started noticing that he had never actually spoken to an American coworker. The people in his weekly meetings, the ones he was handing his engineering code and chip designs to, were all in Nanjing.
In August 2021, Taiwanese investigators raided the company. They alleged the Hsinchu operation was a locally registered front for the Nanjing firm of the same name (the Chinese name differed by exactly one character) and that it had no permission to operate in Taiwan at all. The Taiwan office was shut down. That was one case out of 166.
Advertisement
Tesla Said the Cybercab Is Legal. NHTSA Wants to See the Homework.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Transportation,
Tesla put its first production Cybercabs on public streets in Austin this week. Federal safety regulators opened a file on them before the next day was over.
The probe is an audit query, AQ26002, from NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation, and it covers roughly 1,000 vehicles. No crash set it off. The agency is asking about paperwork, specifically the paperwork Tesla filed on itself.
Click to continue reading Tesla Said the Cybercab Is Legal. NHTSA Wants to See the Homework.
153 Million License Scans Are for Sale, and the Sellers Say They Still Have Access
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Misc. Tech,
The last time you handed your driver's license to a rental car counter, or a hotel front desk, or the guy working the door at a dispensary, somebody ran it through a scanner. You probably never learned the name of the company behind that scanner. You never signed up with them, either.
A dark web store called Nexus is selling those scans. Its catalog claims 153 million driver's licenses covering people in the United States and Canada. Brian Krebs broke the story Wednesday at Krebs on Security, and he verified it against himself. He found a record holding six image files of his own license, timestamped to a trip he took in June 2025. Other people he reached out to found their own records too.
Sony Tells a Judge That Thinking You Own Your PlayStation Games Is Unreasonable
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
You've clicked a button that says Buy. On the PlayStation Store it says Buy Now, then Confirm Purchase, and then the money leaves your account and the game shows up in your library. Sony's lawyers have now told a federal judge that if you walked away from that thinking you bought something, your understanding wasn't a reasonable one.
That's the argument in a motion Sony filed on August 21 in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America, the proposed class action over PlayStation Store checkout language now in front of Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. Sony's filing says "reasonable consumers would not be misled" into believing they own the digital games they buy, and that its checkout already does what California law asks, because you agree to the license terms before the purchase goes through. The Software Product License Agreement puts it flatly: "The software is licensed to you, not sold."
Apple Says an Ex-Engineer Took Circuit Schematics to OpenAI, Then Tried to Erase the Trail
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Apple's trade secrets fight with OpenAI now has a name attached to it. In an amended complaint filed August 31, Apple accuses Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer who left for OpenAI, of downloading dozens of confidential Apple files after he'd already started the new job. Circuit schematics among them, Apple says.
Then it gets worse for Liu, at least in Apple's telling. Apple claims that once he found out about the internal investigation, he directed an OpenAI coworker to "restore" Apple-issued devices, which Apple reads as an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. All of this is an allegation in an active lawsuit. Nothing has been proven, and OpenAI denies it.
A Judge Just Hit Pause on the $110 Billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Home Entertainment, Movies,
The biggest media deal in years was supposed to be a done thing by September. Then a federal judge picked up the phone, so to speak, and hit pause. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin temporarily froze the $110 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, and just like that, the plan to smash two of Hollywood's biggest companies into one got a lot less certain.
Here is why you should care even if you have never thought about a cable licensing agreement in your life. This is the deal that would have put Paramount+ and HBO Max under the same roof, along with CBS, MTV, CNN, and HBO. That is a staggering amount of what you watch, controlled by one company. A coalition of 12 state attorneys general looked at that and said: not so fast.
Click to continue reading A Judge Just Hit Pause on the $110 Billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
Apple Just Told 40 Ex-Employees at OpenAI: Don’t Delete Anything
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Imagine opening your email inbox at your new job and finding a letter from your old employer's lawyers telling you not to delete anything. That is roughly the week that about 40 former Apple engineers just had, all of them now working at OpenAI.
Apple has sent legal preservation letters to those ex-employees, ordering them to hold onto any documents and messages that might matter to a trade secret lawsuit the company filed last week. In plain terms, Apple is telling people it used to pay: whatever you have, keep it, because we may come looking.
Click to continue reading Apple Just Told 40 Ex-Employees at OpenAI: Don’t Delete Anything
Universal Sued Nintendo Over Donkey Kong. And It Backfired. (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Video Games, Videos,
Picture the year 1983. You walk into a video arcade during its absolute golden era, the air thick with cheap pizza and ozone, that wild geometric carpet under your feet, the whole room a chaotic symphony of beeps and bloops. Arcades were printing money. But behind all that noise, a genuinely bizarre legal brawl was brewing, and it pitted a Hollywood titan, Universal Studios, against an underdog Japanese company that got its start back in 1889 making playing cards.
That company was Nintendo, the game was Donkey Kong, and Universal was convinced Nintendo's smash hit infringed on its trademark for King Kong. It's a David-versus-Goliath story played out in federal court, and it did not end the way Universal expected.
Click to continue reading Universal Sued Nintendo Over Donkey Kong. And It Backfired. (Video)
Los Angeles Judge Orders Defendant to Unlock iPhone with Fingerprint
Posted by Jason Diaz Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Corporate News,
The Apple encryption battles continues! Despite Apple coming up on top when the FBI and the DoJ’s petition to unlock the infamous Bernardino iPhone was withdrawn, a new brouhaha has commenced. A court order has been filed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Alicia Rosenberg mandating that Los Angeles defendant, Paytsar Bkjchadzhyan, unlock her iPhone by placing her finger on the Touch ID’s home button.
Click to continue reading Los Angeles Judge Orders Defendant to Unlock iPhone with Fingerprint
Read More 
| LA Times
Supreme Court to drop the hammer on Internet threats
Posted by Ariel Levin-Waldman Categories: Corporate News, Internet,
Anyone who has spent any time online has probably gotten a death threat or two. Maybe you were playing Call of Duty and some 11-year-old questioned your sexuality before telling you he'd kill your family. Maybe you offended the legions of desperate Tumblr bloggers in some arcane way and you woke up to a swarm of messages on your dash saying they would hack you and your dog apart with rusty machetes. You probably did what any reasonable person did and rolled your eyes and went about your day.
Statements and threats on the internet aren't usually taken seriously. Both the giver and the receiver are usually anonymous and the threat is usually over the top enough that you laugh and think nothing of it.
Well, the highest court in the United States might be ready to have the final word.
Click to continue reading Supreme Court to drop the hammer on Internet threats