News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey’s threat to pull the Fox network from the airwaves if Aereo wins its legal battle to retransmit over-the-air TV signals without paying for them is probably nothing more than bluster. But the fact …
When faced with a lawsuit that has even a slim chance of success, lawyers almost always urge businesses to settle rather than fight. Litigation is extremely expensive, and unless the suit raises an issue of principle that is important to …
As a core operating system, Android is thriving. As a brand–and a user experience–it is dead. Facebook just killed it.
Android’s brand demise has been coming for a long time. Phone makers have been taking advantage of Android’s open architecture to …
By any reasonable standard, Aereo is a ridiculous service. But the rules and contracts that cover the distribution of television content are anything but reasonable. And that means that Aereo, silly as it is, could be the beginning of the …
Just two week after the Supreme Court stop a publisher’s attempt to impose tight limits on the ability of purchasers to resell books, a federal judge in New York has reminded us of the limits on our resale rights when …
Apple is really bad at the cloud. And while that is not hurting the company much today, it is going to become a growing problem as users rely on a growing number of devices and come to expect that all …
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has a well-earned reputation as a place where non-practicing entities, more colorfully known as patent trolls, use their dubious patents to extort money from companies that actually do things and make stuff. …
Julius Genachowski was one of President Obama’s original tech warriors, so hopes were high when he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2009. He leaves the post some modest accomplishments, some bigger disappointments, and a general sense of …
“Naked” Friden D10 (Photo: Jake Wildstrom)
My son, a mathematician at the University of Louisville, has a new hobby: restoring mechanical calculators. These machines were obsolete long before he was born, but a visit this past weekend brought back a …
I don’t know how much Google is saving by killing off Reader, but it is rapidly becoming clear that it wasn’t worth it.
Most people don’t know what an RSS reader is and Reader never became a popular offering on the …
The dominant picture of Apple in the media today is of a company on the ropes: out of ideas, falling behind the competition, stock price battered, doomed. It’s reached the point where the CEO of BlackBerry, of all people, is …
By the conventional standards of business, it would be hard to find two companies with a greater tendency to do things wrong than Google and Amazon. Yet both are regarded as outstanding success story. What is going on here, and …
The news that the ranking Republican and Democratic members of the house Judiciary committee plan to introduce legislation to legalize the unlocking of mobile phones by consumers greatly increases the chances that Congress will reverse the refusal of the Library …
Windows RT was a bold move by Microsoft to make its mark in the world of ARM-powered tablets. But five months after launch, it is looking more and more like an expensive flop.
The German site Heise Online reports (h/t to …
Buying software has always been an illusion. When you bought a program in a box, it seemed like you were purchasing something like a book or a music CD. But if you looked closely at the terms and conditions you …