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Showing posts with the label us court

Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

Google can scan millions of books for an online library, the US court of appeal ruled

The court rejected claims from a group of authors that Google Books violated their intellectual property rights.  Judges sided with an earlier ruling that the digital library was "fair use" and provided a public service.  Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger said the decision was disappointing.  The Authors Guild and some individual writers filed the lawsuit in 2005, claiming the project infringed on copyright protection and authors' ability to make money from their work.  Google Books is a project to scan and digitise millions of books to allow users to search and read excerpts from them. Judge Pierre Leval wrote: "Google's division of the page into tiny  snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author's copyright interests)."Google said it would have faced b...

Apple wins appeal over smartphone patents

Samsung could be forced to stop selling some phones after Apple won an appeal in a US court.  The decision comes after a lawsuit first filed in 2012 in which Apple claimed Samsung was using some of its technology without proper permission.  That case was decided in May 2014 when Apple was awarded $120m (£76m) damages.  Apple appealed, saying Samsung should stop selling phones using the disputed features. Judges disagreed but this latest ruling overturns that decision. Apple's bid to stop Samsung selling some handsets was initially  denied because the judges overseeing the case said the company had not demonstrated it had suffered significant harm from the infringement.  Now, two of the three judges reviewing the case have said Apple deserves an injunction to stop Samsung selling some phones.  However, this does not mean that Samsung will be forced to stop selling phones that use the disputed technology. The ruling means the case returns to the ...