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Samsung Gear came to market in 2013 and it offered a camera and speaker built right into its one and only band and clasp design. After Apple introduced the Apple Watch with multiple band options and its quick and easy install mechanism for changing the bands, Samsung set out to copy that idea as quickly as they possibly could. In a patent application that surfaced today at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office titled "Wearable Device," they discuss their new "exchangeable" strap mechanisms. What struck me was that a great number of their form factor patent figures were actually Apple...

The son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he’s “honored” President Obama would “plagiarize” a line from his Republican National Convention speech. “I’m honored that POTUS would plagiarize a line from my speech last week. Where’s the outrage?” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Thursday, following Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech on Wednesday night in Philadelphia. Last week, when addressing the Republican convention in Cleveland, Trump Jr. said: "There’s so much work to do. We will not accept the current state of our country because it’s too hard to change. That’s not the America I know. We’re going to unleash the...

NEW YORK (AP) — Time editor-at-large and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has been suspended by both the magazine and the network for lifting several paragraphs by another writer for his use in a recent Time column. Zakaria apologized Friday, declaring in a statement he made "a terrible mistake," adding, "It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault." In a separate statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said the magazine accepts Zakaria's apology, but would suspend his column for one month, "pending further review." "What he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their...

A sting operation by Google reveals that Microsoft has been copying results from Google for its Bing search engine. The search giant alleges that Microsoft has been using its Internet Explorer web browser and the Bing Search bar to harvest information on Google users, according to a lengthy report by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who oversees the search engine’s ranking algorithm, was crystal clear about the findings. “Our testing has concluded that Bing is copying Google web search results,” Singhal told FoxNews.com. Bing, although denying that they outright copy results, has all but...

NEW YORK (AP) - The Associated Press will collect undisclosed damages as part of a settlement of its lawsuit against All Headline News, a site that allegedly misappropriated AP stories online. The AP considered the lawsuit an important test of the "hot news" doctrine, which was established in a 1918 Supreme Court case involving the AP. That principle holds that while facts cannot be copyrighted, news organizations can sue when competitors copy time-sensitive stories.

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has...

A frightening bit of legislation was introduced to the US House Judiciary Committee on Friday. The Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 (PDF) is sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) (PDF) and would close that pesky analog hole that poses such a dire threat to the survival of the music and movie industries. The bill was originally planned for introduction in early November, but was tabled after hearings held by the House Subcomittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. Calling the ability to convert analog video content to a digital format a "significant...

-- Music copied onto blank recordable CDs is becoming a bigger threat to the bottom line of record stores and music labels than online file-sharing, the head of the recording industry's trade group said Friday. "Burned" CDs accounted for 29 percent of all recorded music obtained by fans in 2004, compared to 16 percent attributed to downloads from online file-sharing networks, said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America. The data, compiled by the market research firm NPD Group, suggested that about half of all recordings obtained by music fans in 2004 were due to authorized...

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, has been talking about the digital future. The other Bill, technology critic Bill Thompson, has been reading between the lines.Bill Gates thinks I'm a communist. Not the old-fashioned state socialist concerned with five-year plans for boot production in the eastern provinces, but a "new modern-day sort of communist", the sort who "want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and movie-makers and software makers". Admittedly, Mr Gates probably does not know who I am and I doubt if he spends a lot of time reading the BBC news site. But he...

BROWNSVILLE -- South Texas college students looking to save money are heading to Mexico to copy their textbooks before returning them for a refund. Jules Frapart, general manager of the Book Bee in Brownsville, said students commonly buy books from him, copy them in Matamoros, Mexico, and return them. An employee at Papeleria La Espanola in Matamoros said it costs 3.5 U.S. cents per page to copy a book. Pasting or binding the book costs $2.36. That adds up to less than $13 to copy a 300-page book. Textbooks range in price from $20 to more than $100 at Frapart's...

<p>A federal judge ruled on Friday that 321 Studios, a software developer, must stop selling its DVD copying program, delivering a huge win for the entertainment industry.</p> <p>Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District Federal Court for California sided with the Motion Picture Association of America, which claimed that 321 Studios' DVD-X Copy and DVD Copy Plus software violate copyright law. The company, based in St. Charles, Missouri, must stop "manufacturing, distributing or otherwise trafficking in any type of DVD circumvention software" in seven days.</p>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood's movie studios face a key test in their battle to defend copyright holders from digital pirates, when a federal court in California this Friday hears a case filed by a maker of software that allows users to copy DVDs. At stake for the studios are potentially billions of dollars in revenues that would be lost if nearly perfect digital copies of movies on DVD were sold in large quantities on the black market or circulated on the Internet in digital files. But the privately held software maker, St. Louis-based 321 Studios, argues that its software...

Vivendi Universal and News Corp's 20th Century Fox have joined TV manufacturers Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), Philips, Sony, Thomson (RCA) and Toshiba and the two satellite services EchoStar and DirecTV, in endorsing a copy protection system for high-definition TV sets. The system, called High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) would be employed in new HDTV sets and settop boxes attached to existing sets. It is aimed at thwarting movie piracy. Transmissions employing the HDMI system, its supporters say, could not be recorded with current digital recorders or even those now being developed.

Copying CDs as easy ABCD By Police Reporter MICHAEL DUFFY03apr02 NEW machines installed in Adelaide convenience stores make the illegal copying of the latest CDs and computer software – which costs artists and software designers millions of dollars – as easy as buying a loaf of bread. The stores have begun installing coin-operated CD duplication machines fitted with software to circumvent anti-copying measures built into some CDs. The Copy Cat CD Duplication machines charge just $5, plus the purchase of a $2 blank disk, to make digitally identical copies of CDs in under 10 minutes. The machines are already...