FTC squelches Ethernet patent squatter's price hike
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N-Data is its parent company's keeper The US Federal Trade Commission is barring a patent-squatting firm from raising its royalty rates for a now-standard Ethernet technology.â¦
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The popular online auction site raises its fees. Is it biting off more than it can chew?
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FTC charges that Petco Web site left customer data exposed.
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DECEMBER 13, 2004  - SAN JOSE -- Cisco Systems Inc.&#39;s prices have typically been higher than those charged by its smaller networking rivals.
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Price hikes may be designed to convince you to upgrade to an all-out Internet security suite. Troublesome Trojan horses, virulent worms, nasty viruses--sometimes it may seem like the Internet exists just to let the bad guys attack your PC.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.
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update A price war is brewing in the world of Internet telephone services, as providers try to win over consumers who now have a host of options when it comes to making calls.
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InfoWorld - An online advertiser that drove traffic to its Web sites by sending out spam with misleading subject lines has agreed to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)Â complaint charging that it failed to tell consumers they had to spend money to receive so-called free products, the FTC announced Wednesday.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission said that QualcommÂ is infringing on one of Broadcom's patents, dealing a blow to Qualcomm in anÂ ongoing patent battleÂ between the companies.
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This week, the US Federal Trade Commission is apparently not yet satisfied that Intel has adequately addressed its standard antitrust concerns. Today, Intel announced it received what is formally called a "second request" notice from the FTC.
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The Story: Some technologies always seem to be ?just around the corner.? Seven years ago, there was a big flurry of interest in end-to-end Ethernet (aka metro Ethernet) as a brace of new ventures promised to cut through the complexities of wide area networking.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    They didn?t deliver. One big reason: building a new network that will reach into offices and homes costs beaucoup bucks. As IDC analyst Boyd Chastant puts it, ?Digging a whole in the ground never gets cheaper.?Laying fiber is still expensive, but now telcos ? including AT&amp;T, Verizon, and Qwest ? plus cable companies such as Optimum LightPath, Cox, and Time Warner that already have fiber in the ground are offering Ethernet services. LightPath, for example, boasts of 2,500 miles of fiber in the ground and says it has lit more than 2,000 buildings in its service area in the northeast.End-to-end Ethernet offers a very affordable way to connect LANs to a wide area network. After all, every router has an Ethernet interface, you don?t need much special hardware, and the technology is very familiar. So most IT staffers will have little trouble adapting, says Burton Group analyst Jeff Young. That is, if you can get it: Pricing depends on your need for speed, and not all of the providers offer it throughout their service areas.Raw bandwidth isn?t Ethernet?s big advantage. It?s not necessarily much faster than private lines. However, says Chastant, it is more scalable. Conventional private-line services offer speeds near the bottom (around 10Mbps) and the near top (around 10Gbps), but not much in the middle. End-to-end Ethernet solves that. And it can be tied to Internet access, bumping up access speeds appreciably.Availability is on the upswing too, says Boyd. In the past, carriers worried that end-to-end Ethernet service would cannibalize other data services. But now that demand has reached critical mass, that concern appears to have faded. Meanwhile, providers and equipment manufacturers are ironing out incompatibles and clarifying service definitions in the Metro Ethernet Forum, Chastant says.It looks like we?ve turned the corner and end-to-end Ethernet is right in front of us.The Bottom Line: If your carrier doesn?t provide end-to-end Ethernet, another provider likely does. It?s worth the trouble to look: End-to-end Ethernet will give you the performance you need and because it?s a familiar technology you won?t have to retrain or replace your IT staff.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Peer-to-peer company accuses RIAA and its partners of infringing upon its patents.
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The Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday that it has blocked a company from seeking higher royalties on a patented technology that is included in a widely used computer networking standard.
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Two years ago, Bob Frankston wrote Why Settle for Just 1%? while in the midst of his ramp-up as a Verizon FiOS customer. The question is still on the table. I'd like us to help answer it by re-phrasing the question: What could we, as Linux developers and users, do with fiber to our homes and businesses?
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has settled a complaint against a company that owns patents to a widely used Ethernet standard, saying the patent owner was attempting to collect huge license fees despite a prior commitment to the contrary.The settlement with Negotiated Data Solutions, or N-Data, will protect computer users from higher prices and ensure competition, the FTC said in a news release.N-Data, in 2003, had obtained two Ethernet patents from Vertical Networks, a spin-off of National Semiconductor. N-Data attempted to collect larger patent license fees than National Semiconductor had negotiated with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a standards body, back in 1994, the FTC said.National promised the IEEE that if the group adopted a standard based on National&#39;s NWay technology, National would offer one-time licenses of US$1,0000 per company to computer manufacturers and sellers of products using the IEEE standard. But N-Data and Vertical Networks had begun collecting license fees &quot;far in excess&quot; of $1,000 per company, according to the FTC complaint.N-Data obtained the patents knowing about National&#39;s commitment, and realizing the computer industry had become committed to the standard, the FTC said. N-Data refused to comply with National&#39;s commitment, and it began demanding royalties after it became expensive and difficult for the industry to switch to another standard, the FTC said in its complaint.The settlement bars N-Data from enforcing the patents unless it has first offered the patent license based on the terms offered in 1994.In addition to higher prices, consumers would be hurt by N-Data because the company&#39;s actions would cast doubt on the reliability of standards-setting agreements, the FTC said. &quot;The cost of ignoring this particularly pernicious problem is too high,&quot; the commission majority wrote.Vertical Networks, which ceased operations after it turned the patent over to N-Data, had estimated that more than 70 percent of the world&#39;s Ethernet port shipments used the NWay Ethernet patents. In early 2002, Vertical Networks set letters to more than 60 companies demanding additional licensing fees, according to the FTC complaint.NWay technology allows two devices at opposite ends of a LAN link to exchange information and automatically configure themselves to optimize their communication, a process sometimes called autonegotiation. Standardizing on a single autonegotiation technology allowed devices made by different manufacturers to work with one another and with different generations of Ethernet equipment.N-Data, based in Chicago, didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comments on the FTC settlement.The FTC voted 3-2 to approve the settlement. N-Data violated federal law by engaging in unfair methods of competition, the FTC said.FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras voted against the settlement, saying the majority didn&#39;t establish an unfair method of competition. &quot;The novel use of our consumer protection authority to protect large corporate members of a standard-setting organization is insupportable,&quot; she wrote in her dissent.
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC), of Hsinchu, Taiwan, has expanded its patent-infringement fight against rival contract chip maker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) by filing a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).
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Description: NPR&#39;s Alex Chadwick talks to Tess Vigeland of Marketplace about the jump in wholesale prices that has fueled inflation worries.