Los Angeles Litigation BLOG

Samsung Refuses to Turn Over Code in Patent Lawsuit

May 18th, 2012

One drawback of being involved in a patent lawsuit is that you may end up having to divulge the patent, the very purpose of which is to protect something. As the judge wrote in the patent battle between Apple and Samsung (the two have now filed more than 30 lawsuits against each other in the past 13 months), having to reveal the computer code that is protected by patents is “disruptive, expensive and fraught with monumental opportunities to screw up.” Samsung recently refused to abide by a court order to reveal its code, and now, it has harmed its legal case. Apple requested – and the court agreed to permit it – to see Samsung’s code regarding two features of Samsung’s Android smartphones – the “bounce back” that happens when you reach the end of a list you are scrolling down, and the “blue glow” that occurs when you highlight…
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Video Game Crunch Time – Is It Legal?

May 16th, 2012

Electronic Arts (“EA”) came under fire a few years ago for its employment practices during “crunch time,” the time during which video game developers put in long hours to make sure that a video game ships on time. The pressure to ship video games on time at large companies is large. One fiancée of an EA employee alleged that he regularly had to work 9am to 10pm seven years a week during crunch time. These allegations led to a class action lawsuit against EA, which the video game giant eventually settled for $14.9 million. EA is far from the only target, though, as video game developers have claimed that crunch time is a common occurrence at many video game companies. In the past, California companies had avoided paying overtime to these video game workers during crunch time because the workers were salaried and, thus, exempt from overtime payments. California amended…
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Wii U Will Feature Touchscreen, App Store, E-Books

May 15th, 2012

Are we due for a new generation of video game consoles or is the video game industry going the way of social media and the cloud? Last year’s holiday season saw a drop in video game sales across the board – spending on video games at retail stores dropped 8 percent, and total sales of games, systems and accessories dropped 21 percent. Some of the spending drop has been a shift away from traditional video game consoles towards new tech trends like games on social media sites or other platforms like smart phones and tablets. What some have also found is that lots of people who own video game consoles now do not even use them for video games, but for services like Netflix or for use as a media center to play music and watch movies. Another problem is the age of today’s consoles, which first started appearing on…
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