Sued -- Engadget Mobile

sued posts

Supreme Court rejects T-Mobile appeal over contracts

by Darren Murph posted May 29th 2008 @ 4:34PM

Just a day after hearing that T-Mobile lost its magenta suit against Telia, more bad news on the legal front has been handed down to the carrier. Just this week, the Supreme Court decided to reject T-Mob's appeal in a trifecta of cases "involving the legal remedies available in millions of cellphone contracts." Each case centered around the same issue: "whether state laws that limit the ability of companies to prohibit consumers from banding together to pursue class action lawsuits are preempted by federal law." In layman's terms, T-Mobile had attempted to ban class actions and require its customers to resolve any gripes via arbitration, which clearly didn't pan out so well. Hit the read link to read the rest, Mr. 1L.

[Via PhoneScoop]

Toshiba sued for cloning Fujitsu's RakuRaku handset

by Darren Murph posted Mar 17th 2008 @ 3:07PM

It's ~~fairly~~ commonplace for Chinese manufacturers to crank out clones of other popular wares, but apparently, things aren't brushed off as easily when the cloning gets done by a mega-corp like Toshiba. Granted, quite a bit is lost in translation here, but the long and short of it is that NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu are suing Tosh for creating and selling its 821T -- which, as you can see above, looks an awful lot like Fujitsu's RakuRaku handset. Reportedly, the plaintiffs have demanded that Softbank Mobile withdraw the 821T from the market, but it seems there's quite a bit more back-and-forth left to go down before the dust settles on this one.

[Via GearFuse]

ITC dashes Qualcomm's hopes, rules in favor of Nokia

by Darren Murph posted Dec 12th 2007 @ 9:55PM

No, this isn't some horrific dream stuck on repeat. The legal quarrels between Nokia and Qualcomm are actually still ongoing, and while a US International Trade Commission judge has indeed issued an initial determination that favors Nokia, you can bet your bottom dollar that Qualcomm will be "petitioning the commission for a review." Nevertheless, judge Paul Luckern reportedly "found no infringement or violation by Nokia of the three asserted Qualcomm patents," which consequently led Nokia's CFO to proclaim that this was simply "another failed attempt by Qualcomm to mislead both Nokia and the telecommunications industry." Of course, we wouldn't recommend striking this battle off as complete -- after all, the determination now has to be forwarded on to the full commission for review, and it's not slated to dole out a final call until April.

[Via Yahoo / Reuters]

SK Telecom fined for incompatible music-playing handsets

by Darren Murph posted Dec 22nd 2006 @ 8:51PM

While Verizon had its own go 'round with the law about crippling Bluetooth functionality on its phones, now South Korea's SK Telecom is facing a stiff fine of its own due to antitrust violations. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) tagged the telecommunications giant with a $356,070 fine after taking issue with programming installed on handsets that only allowed users to play back music purchased through the firm's "Melon" music service. Interestingly, the report claims that "MP3 files obtained legally through different online sources cannot work on SK Telecom licensed phones, forcing MP3 file users to purchase only MP3 files from Melon," which leads us to believe that MP3 -- at least in this instance -- refers to any digital audio file. Nevertheless, the company now has 60 days to correct the problem and allow users to rock out to whatever tunes they so desire, so those affected by this snafu should be good to go come February.

[Via Techdirt]