Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 224

We all knew this was coming, but it looks like there's now more movement in the news department from DigiTimes' latest report. Industry sources are now claiming that Apple could move from Samsung to TSMC for their A-series production.

At first, you would think this only effects Samsung - as they'd lose Apple's huge business, but TSMC would also benefit, greatly. But remember, TSMC have some gigantic clients in NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Broadcom and more, and this move would effect every single one of them, considerably. At the moment, Samsung is the only source of production for Apple's A-series of processors, which include the A5, A6 and A6X processors.

These chips are baked into the latest and greatest iDevices, such as the iPhone 5 and iPad (new, new one - the fourth-gen, yes it's confusing). Rewinding back to the A4 and A5 processors, which were designed by Intrinsity, but had input from Samsung in terms of their design. Apple acquired Intrinsity in 2010 - but they may have had some interesting intellectual property that Apple couldn't take over to share with TSMC, forcing them to make a custom-designed processor which materialized into the A6.

Apple aren't the only ones that get mixed up in the news over work practices, as Samsung have come under fire from a rights group on Tuesday over illegal work practices at its Chinese suppliers. The company admitted just 24 hours previous, that excessive overtime and fines for employees in China.

The New York-based China Labor Watch have said that employees working at Samsung's suppliers sometime work a crazy 16 hours per day, with just a single day off per month. Samsung said on Monday, after a review of 105 of its Chinese suppliers, which involved more than 65,000 employees, that illegal work practices were found. But the South Korean company said that the companies involved would be given two more years to change their ways. Two more years! Samsung said in a statement:

We have identified the need for initiatives to reduce employee overtime as a top priority, and we are researching and developing measures that will eliminate hours beyond legal limits by the end of 2014.

If you ever thought that Google just waved their fingers and had magical algorithms working their search results, you'd be flat out wrong. The Register has opened up the Google 160-page guidebook, which is a reference manual for human "raters".

This has revealed that there's a big human involvement in the results provided by Google when a user runs a search. Google actually outsource to a few different crowdsourcing agencies - Lionbridge and Leapforce, where they use real people and their real-life opinions on search results. The Register refers to one Leapforce job ad, where they employ around 1500 search assessors which is a great work-from-home job.

Before landing this glorious work-from-home job, a potential employee must first pass an initial examination. After this, search assessors will receive periodic Google evaluations to ensure they're doing a standup job on grading search results. The 160-page manual also informs raters about how to rank search results basic on multiple metrics, such as quality, relevance and spamminess. Google's search assessors will judge the results for various queries and choose from different tiered grades, including "Not Spam", "Maybe Spam", "Porn", "Off-Topic", "Unratable", "Vital" and more.

Samsung just can't seem to escape being sued lately. After losing to Apple to the tune of $1 billion, Ericsson has now filed a lawsuit against the South Korean electronics giant claiming that they have refused to sign licensing agreements for some of Ericsson's patents, even after two years of negotiations.

Ericsson issued the following statement on their website:

The dispute concerns both Ericsson's patented technology that is essential to several telecommunications and networking standards used by Samsung's products as well as other of Ericsson's patented inventions that are frequently implemented in wireless and consumer electronics products. Ericsson has concluded that it has no option other than legal action after negotiations have not been successful since Samsung has refused to take a license on FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms

Google has settled with Immersion just nine months after it was sued by Immersion, a company that develops touch feedback systems. The deal sees Google licensing the patents for use in future Motorola devices, along with compensating the company for using the technology in prior Motorola devices.

The lawsuit was filed against Motorola before Google officially acquired them in May 2012. The original lawsuit alleged that Motorola infringed upon six of Immersions patents and was filed with the US ITC, which has the power to block imports should a device be found to be infringing. CEO Victor Viegas:

The successful resolution of this case is a critical step in our overall strategy of enforcing and monetizing our intellectual property, including Basic Haptics, and we're pleased to achieve a settlement that is consistent with our business model, which is largely based on per unit running royalties.

Amazon is touting that Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the best days for the Kindle family in terms of sales. They say that Cyber Monday more than doubled last year's numbers for the Kindle family, which puts this at the single best day. These sales were certainly helped by the fact Amazon put the Kindle Fire on sale.

Amazon provided the following as the milestones for the holiday shopping weekend:

"Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fires have held the top 4 spots on the Amazon worldwide best sellers list since launch, and that was before the busiest shopping weekend of the year," said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "We're excited that customers made this Black Friday and Cyber Monday the best ever for Kindle worldwide-Cyber Monday was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales, and we're looking forward to millions of customers opening a new Kindle this holiday season."

A collection of adult movie companies aren't happy with Verizon. They say that the ISP defends BitTorrent pirates by systematically rejecting court-ordered subpoenas for information and they claim that these objections are in bad faith due to Verizon supposedly getting profit from users who are BitTorrenting.

A court has previously ruled that an IP address is not enough to hold someone responsible for pirating, but that hasn't stopped companies from trying. Adult movie companies are still filing the mass lawsuits using IPs as the identification of the users. They then ask the court to subpoena the ISP for subscriber information.

Verizon currently rejects these requests systematically as the subscriber isn't necessarily the one who did the illegal sharing. Verizon argues that "[The subpoena] seeks information that is protected from disclosure by third parties' rights of privacy and protections guaranteed by the first amendment."

The whole debacle with MegaUpload founder, Kim Dotcom, has been pretty bad since day one - but now new evidence has popped up and has Dotcom seeking to have the case against him dismissed.

The new evidence suggests the FBI forced Dotcom to preserve 39 pirated movies from another case unrelated to us, with Dotcom's lawyers saying that the 39 movie files were uploaded after the FBI investigated a website called 'ninjavideo.com', this site used a cloud storage database from megaupload.com to store the movies in 2010. The FBI then made a seizure on megaupload.com.

The 39 files were identified during an investigation into the NinjaVideo site, which used MegaUpload's cloud storage for their pirated movies. The FBI later took down the MegaUpload site, based that seizure on the same files being stored, even though Dotcom says he was cooperating with the FBI as much as possible.

Seriously, Apple - innovate instead of suing. You have one god damn smartphone on the market, the iPhone 5, in a single size - and yet they just continue bashing forward with lawsuits. Their market cap has experienced over $150 billion in drops in the past two months - and it has no signs of slowing.

Well, today Apple have launched yet another suit, adding the Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S III with Android 4.1 and four other products to their latest lawsuit against Samsung. Apple have already added some of those devices, such as the Galaxy S III, but between then and now, they've received software updates - which leads us to another round of requested inclusions, sigh.

The other four devices added are Samsung's Galaxy S III mini, Rugby Pro, Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wi-Fi and the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. With these devices, we could see the lawsuits (plural) dragged out into 2014 - hearings are expected to take place early next year.

It's a constant message repeated by the RIAA, MPAA, and others: Pirating is bad. However, a new study conducted in the UK has shown that UK customers who pirate end up spending way more at the box office than those who don't do any sort of illegal file sharing. It's the type of findings that the RIAA don't like people to hear.

The survey, conducted by OFCOM, interviewed 4,400 Internet users aged 12 and up. The resulting 94-page report shows that 16 percent of respondents had downloaded at least one item illegally and one-quarter of the group consumed only pirated content. The flip-side of this is that 75 percent of the pirates also pay for digital content.

The so-called "hybrid" pirates make up roughly 12 percent of the British population and the report claims that people in this group spend up to three times as much as non-pirates on legal purchases. 48 percent of respondents said they download illegally because it's convenient and 44 percent said they do it because it's quick.