Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 237

Clive Palmer, an Australian billionaire, is set to spend quite a bunch of cash on building a full-sized replica of the Titanic. Now, you're probably thinking a replica, would be a 1/100, or 1/1000 scale model, but this is the real deal, the real size of the original Titanic.

The design of the replica is being completed in Europe, with the construction of the ship to begin toward the end of this year in China. Palmer has said that the Titanic 2 will keep 98% of the original Titanic design, with the 2% in changes reserved for building in modern standards and regulatory requirements. Palmer says:

You'll have the exact same cabins as the original Titanic. If you want to go in third class, eat potatoes...dance around in circles with an Irish band, you'll be able to do it.

Pirate Bay co-founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has been arrested in Phnom Penh after the Swedish government had made a request for his detention to the Cambodian.

A spokesperson for the Cambodian police has said that Cambodia doesn't have an extradition treaty with Sweden. Kirth Chantharith told the AFP:

We don't have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case.

It looks as though Apple is getting thirsty for more Samsung blood, as they've amended their complaint with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, where the Cupertino-based company has added two versions of two Galaxy phones.

The first of which is the Galaxy Note, followed by the Galaxy S III. This case was lodged back in February, and is separate to the current Apple vs. Samsung case that saw the ban of a heap of Samsung smart devices.

This case takes aim at the Galaxy S III, it's Verizon-based version, the Galaxy Note, as well as the recently-released Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. The total number of devices Apple are going against with just Samsung now stands at an incredible 21. According to Apple, Samsung has "continued to flood the market with copycat products".

Wondering how much Apple and Samsung paid in attorney fees for the trial? Well, we don't have those numbers, but we do have a breakdown of what some of their lawyers bill and an idea of how long they had to work for different things. Apple's lawyers spent a total of 232 hours working on just one motion for sanctions against Samsung.

The bill for those hours? $116,668.50. Not bad, eh? Sounds like some of us need a change in career. And when it's all said and done, all of that money could come directly from Samsung, as often the other party is liable for attorney's fees in a lawsuit. That's minuscule when compared to the $1+ billion in damages, but only accounts for one motion. The entire trial was likely much, much more expensive.

Samsung, to not be outdone by Apple, has released information about its expenditures for three separate motions. The total, $258,200.50, is higher than Apple's, but was for three motions instead of one. Incredibly, one of Samsung's lawyers charges over $1,000 ($1,035, to be exact), which is more than a third more than Apple's highest paid lawyer.

Things are really heating up in the Samsung vs. Apple patent lawsuits, where last week we saw Samsung slapped with a $1 billion-plus fine, as well as many of their Galaxy-branded devices removed from US retail shelves. But, and this is a big but, Samsung are waiting in the shadows, with some serious firepower.

The Korea Times is reporting that Samsung have "confirmed that it will immediately sue Apple if the latter releases products using advanced long-term evolution (LTE) mobile technology". IP research firm iRunway, earlier this year found that Samsung fully owns 10% of all LTE patents issued so far, meaning that they are definitely putting their money where their mouth is.

Now, Apple would be a bit stupid, and far behind the times to release a next-generation iPhone without LTE, so this is going to get very, very interesting. If they release the new iPhone with 3G only, we'd be looking at waiting nearly an entire year before they release another phone, which would still not include 4G. Apple don't have many moves to make here. Another thing to consider is that the Cupertino-based company already has their iPad with 4G capabilities, have Samsung been waiting for the new iPhone before they pounce?

LulzSec, a hacktivist group similar to Anonymous, has seen members getting arrested after the leader of the group started helping the FBI. The latest arrest is of Ronaldo Rivera (20), a hacker from Tempe, Arizona. He faces up to 15 years in prison if he is convicted on charges of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of protected computers.

Rivera is said to have worked with Cody Kretsinger (24) in hacking Sony Picture's computers. During the hack in 2011, they obtained more than 1,000,000 users' personal information including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, and dates of birth. The hacking was announced and credit taken by LulzSec through a posting on Pastebin:

We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users' personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts...What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext.

I'm sure most users have heard about the alleged eBook pricing that several publishers were involved in. Three of the major publishers that were accused of price fixing have agreed to settle with 54 District Attorneys across the United Sates. They announced the settlement in which Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, and Simon & Schuster have agreed to pay $69 million over the alleged eBook price inflation.

"While publishers are entitled to their profits, consumers are equally entitled to a fair and open marketplace," Attorney General Jepsen said today in a statement. "This settlement will provide restitution to those customers who were harmed by this price-fixing scheme, but it also will restore competition in the eBook market for consumers' long-term benefit."

Apple has, of course, refused to to settle. Macmillan and Penguin have also declined to settle. Steve jobs could be the root cause of bringing attention to the issue when he told his biographer about offering them the agency model, which came with higher prices.

It was only a matter of time, and with Apple not slowing down with their growing list of patent targets, Google are now looking to attack the iPhone maker, reports AndroidPIT. Apple are currently looking to ban as many Android-based products as possible, with lawsuits against Samsung, HTC and Motorola, and that's just recently.

Google only recently acquired Motorola, and will now defend their acquisition against Apple. The Mountain View-based company are now seeking a sales ban on not just the iPhone, but the iPad and Mac computers across the United States. Google have pledged support for Android device makers in the past, but this is different, this is now Google, telling Apple, this is it, we've had enough, back down or feel the wrath of Google.

Apple's lawsuit against Samsung that was victorious earlier this week targeted relatively small things, like rectangles and other shape-related patent infringements. Google aren't being so petty, and are claiming patent infringement for non-standard essential patents. This means that Google and their recently acquired Motorola, have filed a case for a patent that courts cannot legally force companies to license, meaning that if Google win this case, Apple could be forced to completely halt the use of this technology in their devices.

Apple may have initially won the court case, but it's not over yet. Samsung have said on Tuesday that they are willing to modify their smartphones if they can't successfully fight the Cupertino-based company's request to have them banned across the US.

Apple made an initial request to ban eight of the South Korean company's smartphones, including one of the most popular, the Galaxy S II. Samsung does plan to fight the request, and would be willing to modify the devices to avoid the ban. How could they do this exactly? Removing their TouchWiz UI and replacing it with the stock Android ROM, be it Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.1 Jelly Bean would do the trick.

Users have been begging smartphone makers to release stock Android ROMs, and it looks like this time is upon us. If Samsung were to begin offering flagship devices with stock Google Android OS's, things could get very interesting, very fast. Could Apple have inadvertently started a new, wonderful trend of smartphone makers pushing devices out with stock, or at least close to stock, Android operating systems?

AMD has hired a new Chief Graphics Product Architect for the Graphics Business Unit. This means that the visionary behind Gustafson's Law will be working on the AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro line of products. With fresh blood comes fresh ideas, so here's to hoping he can come up with something that really pushes graphics technology forward.

"Our industry-leading graphics technology predicates that we consistently deliver the most differentiated and superior graphics processor unit (GPU) architectures and products -- without compromise," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics. "With the growing importance of parallel compute in defining the computing experience, John brings the full package of industry experience and knowledge needed to help us expand and execute our AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro graphics technology programs, and will help forge an aggressive long-term roadmap that allows AMD to continue to lead and win with our gaming and virtualization technologies."

John Gustafson's resume is impressive and he will surely be an asset to the company. He joins AMD from Intel, where he "headed the company's eXtreme Technologies Lab, conducting cutting-edge research on energy-efficient computing and memory, as well as optical, energy and storage technologies."