Tag: battle
Designer Katie Perry wins Australian trademark battle against Katy Perry
Making ‘Dough’ Helped Fuel Liam Frumkin’s Winning Battle with Anorexia
Apple’s Trade Secret Battle With Masimo Over Pulse Oximetry Technology Ends in Mistrial
Six jurors wanted to decide in favor of Apple, but one juror held strong for Masimo, leading to an impasse. Earlier this afternoon, the jurors sent the judge a note asking what to do because the juror voting in favor of Masimo would not change her position.
The judge initially planned to send the jurors home for the night with deliberations to continue on Tuesday, but after they insisted they would not be able to come to a consensus, he opted to call it.
Apple and Masimo have been in court over the last few weeks to determine whether Apple illegally poached Masimo employees and stole trade secrets when developing the Apple Watch. Masimo was seeking over $1.8 billion in damages and co-ownership of five Apple pulse oximetry patents that Masimo said used its technology.
Apple in July 2013 hired Chief Medical Officer Michael O’Reilly and then in 2014, it hired Cercacor Chief Technical Officer Marcelo Lamego (Cercacor is a Masimo spinoff company). Masimo claims that the two former employees inappropriately shared Masimo’s intellectual property when they developed the Apple Watch, which Apple denies.
During the trial, Masimo attempted to demonstrate that Apple Watch development was floundering prior to the hiring of the two Masimo employees, pointing to a 2013 email where now-retired Apple executive Bob Mansfield called the Apple Watch “a mess” and said the sensor would “fail” on its “current path.”
Apple maintained that there was no Masimo IP was used in its work on the Apple Watch, and further, that what Masimo claims are “trade secrets” are ideas “long known and used by multiple companies.” Apple said that Masimo targeted it because Masimo saw the success of Apple Watch and wanted to make its own smart watch. Masimo did indeed come out with an Apple Watch-like wearable in late 2022 after decades of focus on large medical devices for healthcare.
In a statement to MacRumors, Apple said that it plans to ask the court to dismiss the trade secret allegations. For context, five of Masimo’s claims against Apple were thrown out during the trial, reducing Masimo’s self-calculated award.
“We thank the jury for their careful consideration in this case. We deeply respect intellectual property and innovation and do not take or use confidential information from other companies. We are pleased that the court correctly rejected half of the plaintiffs’ trade secret allegations, and will now ask the court to dismiss the remaining claims.”
Masimo said that it plans to continue pursuing the trade theft case.
“While we are disappointed that the jury was unable to reach a verdict, we intend to retry the case and continue to pursue legal redress against Apple. As we begin that process, the United States Trade Commission is scheduled in the coming months to decide whether to ban the importation of certain models of the Apple Watch, following a ruling last year by an Administrative Law Judge that Apple infringed one of Masimo’s patents for pulse oximetry.”
Masimo previously sued Apple for patent infringement, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ended up invalidating all but two of the patents. The United States International Trade Commission in January said that Apple had infringed on a Masimo patent, a case that is still ongoing.
This article, “Apple’s Trade Secret Battle With Masimo Over Pulse Oximetry Technology Ends in Mistrial” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Barry Humphries’ secret cancer battle and heartbreaking final days with loved ones revealed
Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes Trailer Introduces A Very Different Battle Royale
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes takes us back more than six decades before Katniss Everdeen fought in her first Hunger Games, and as we see in the first trailer released on Thursday evening, the filmmakers gave the film a very retro look indeed.
The art style of the film, which tells the story of the future President Snow mentoring a Hunger Games contestant when he was much younger, takes a hard turn from the retro-futuristic look of the original four films, draping everything with a fascinating early-to-mid 20th Century aesthetic.
Check out the trailer here.
Epic Games Loses Again in Battle With Apple Over App Store Rules
In 2021, the judge overseeing the case sided with Apple, concluding that Apple was not violating antitrust law and was not a monopolist. Epic Games almost immediately appealed the ruling and claimed that the original court “reached the wrong answer” and “made multiple legal errors.” Unfortunately for Epic Games, the appeals court today sided with Apple, upholding the original ruling.
According to Bloomberg, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Epic’s claims that the App Store rules violate federal antitrust law by not allowing for third-party app marketplaces. This is largely a win for Apple, but the court did also uphold the original court’s decision on Apple’s anti-steering rules.
Apple was ordered to implement App Store changes that will allow developers to use metadata buttons, links, and other calls to action to direct customers to purchasing mechanisms outside of the App Store, paving the way for developers to implement alternate payment options.
“There is a lively and important debate about the role played in our economy and democracy by online transaction platforms with market power,” said the appeals court. “Our job as a federal court of appeals, however, is not to resolve that debate — nor could we even attempt to do so. Instead, in this decision, we faithfully applied existing precedent to the facts.”
Apple has been able to put off making App Store updates until the conclusion of the appeals trial, as Apple had appealed the portion of the ruling that did not go in its favor. Apple will presumably need to make changes to the App Store at some point in the near future to comply with the court’s ruling.
According to Apple, the proposed App Store changes could “upset the careful balance between developers and customers provided by the App Store,” resulting in irreparable harm to Apple and consumers. Apple also said that it needed time to figure out the “complex and rapidly evolving legal, technological, and economic issues” that the update would cause.
In a statement to MacRumors, Apple said that the decision reaffirms its “resounding victory” against Epic Games.
Today’s decision reaffirms Apple’s resounding victory in this case, with nine of ten claims having been decided in Apple’s favor. For the second time in two years, a federal court has ruled that Apple abides by antitrust laws at the state and federal levels. The App Store continues to promote competition, drive innovation, and expand opportunity, and we’re proud of its profound contributions to both users and developers around the world. We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling on the one remaining claim under state law and are considering further review.
Though Apple said that it support the court’s decision, the company does disagree with the ruling on the App Store changes, and says that it is “considering further review.”
This article, “Epic Games Loses Again in Battle With Apple Over App Store Rules” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Migrants will now have the right to claim legal aid to fund their battle against deportation
Man whose father never accepted him as his own loses legal battle for share of his £500,000 estate
Natalie Merchant on her ‘weird brain virus’ battle and new album ‘Keep Your Courage’
NATALIE Merchant sings softly with unshakeable resolve, “Keep your courage, keep your faith.”
Against a backdrop of understated piano and strings, she’s four minutes into The Feast Of Saint Valentine, which she calls her “hymn for the broken-hearted”.
Cue the line that gave her the title of her eighth studio album, Keep Your Courage.
While beseeching her listeners to stay strong through the travails of love, Merchant has needed courage and faith of a different kind to get her career back on track.
During the pandemic, she contracted “some weird brain virus” which, at the outset, she believed to be Covid.
In fact, it was life-threatening anaplasmosis, commonly transmitted by ticks. While in hospital, an infectious disease specialist told her: “We almost lost you.”
As if that wasn’t enough, a few months earlier and just before the first lockdown, she had emergency surgery on her collapsing spine after suffering an alarming combination of numbness and severe pain.
I’m meeting Merchant in the refined surroundings of London Langham Hotel, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, during her whistlestop promo tour.
I find her restored to good health, in excellent spirits, with her passion for music and life clearly rekindled.
But she’s feeling the effects of her long haul flight from America’s East Coast.
“Jet lag is mysterious,” she says. “You go to bed at the appropriate time, then lie there for three hours and wonder why you can’t fall asleep.
“Of course, it’s because your body cries out, ‘No, it’s not the right time!’ ”
Merchant returns to her “lush and layered” first collection of all new compositions since her self-titled 2014 album — and it’s a story of triumph of adversity.
It begins on the operating table in March, 2020, a week before the Covid lockdowns upended all our lives.
For six gruelling hours, surgeons “removed bones” and “inserted screws and hinges” in her spine, drastically compromising her ability to sing.
“I found myself double locked down, stuck in a chair and in a neck brace,” reports the 59-year-old who left alt-rock darlings 10,000 Maniacs three decades ago to go solo.
“I’ve had a long crawl back to full physical capacity. I didn’t have my full voice for nine months and couldn’t use my right hand to play the piano very well.”
While getting back on her feet, another calamity befell the dedicated “country person” from upstate New York who loves donning her wellies and communing with nature.
Merchant continues: “Within a month of surgery, I was building trails in the forest — and falling over. Luckily, I didn’t have access to my surgeon because he would probably have had me committed.
“But I just couldn’t stay in the house any longer. It was spring and I wasn’t in pain any more — I was healing.
“The first time I went out for a walk by myself after taking off the neck brace, I slipped on a log and fell onto the side of my face.
“I lay there sobbing, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Fortunately, despite much soreness, “the hinges and screws all held together” and she gingerly picked herself up.
During her recuperation, Merchant began forming ideas for Keep Your Courage, a powerful conflation of richly textured music and poetic lyrics filled with profound expression.
Key to getting her creative juices flowing was Scottish poet Robin Robertson, best known for his enthralling narrative poem The Long Take, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize.
“He sent me his extraordinary book in lockdown and I was so inspired by it,” says Merchant.
‘A big abyss opened’
“Then we had great correspondence going for months about language and writing.
“Robin kept encouraging me so I started writing again. I hadn’t really composed a song in five or six years. I was so busy doing other things.”
A tireless campaigner on a range of issues including domestic violence, fracking, getting the vote out and racism, Merchant likes to fill her life with purpose.
She says: “Just because I didn’t write an album of original material in nearly a decade, I don’t want people to have the false impression that this is my big comeback.
“I actually made three records in that time and built a music curriculum at a free preschool for poor children.
“I bought and renovated a house. I got my daughter through school and off to a good college.
“I was engaged in an anti-fracking campaign and, in the end, we got a New York State ban, which was phenomenal.
“Because of that, I started thinking of writing poetry and playing piano as a waste of time. I considered it self-indulgent.”
She was also determined to be a hands-on mother to her daughter Lucia whose time at home with her was extended by the pandemic.
“But I don’t have her with me any more and that opened a big abyss called empty nest,” she admits.
Her attitude towards making music again completely changed when she found herself alone again.
“My daughter went back to college in September (2021) and, by the first week of October, I was in the studio. I didn’t even have all of the songs finished but I’d already booked it out.”
As for the result of her labours, Merchant proclaims: “Love looms large — it looms large in all our lives, right? We all crave connection.”
The album’s tone is set by two horn-fuelled anthems, Big Girls and Come On, Aphrodite, which pairs Merchant’s singular vocals with the glorious tones of gospel singer Abena Koomson-Davis from the Resistance Revival Chorus.
They first sang together at New York’s fabled Radio City Music Hall during a socially distanced concert to thank frontline healthcare workers for their heroic efforts during the pandemic.
Merchant recalls: “That was very moving and our voices suited each other’s so I said to Abena, ‘Will you record with me?’ She replied, ‘Name the date’.
“I wrote both of those songs with her in mind. They established our sisterhood in a very strong way.”
Big Girls acknowledges suffering and loss, particularly because of Covid, but Merchant also wanted the song “to encourage people to believe they have the strength to carry on”.
‘In a pool of tears’
“There’s all this imagery of disaster, of waters rising, of thunder and lightning, and the arrangement with strings and brass builds to a pinnacle.
“Then Abena sings, ‘Hold on, hold on!’ even though she swore she couldn’t sing that high.
“We made a great video for it, just the two of us singing directly to camera, and everyone I’ve shown it to has ended up in a pool of tears.”
Come On, Aphrodite is the product of Merchant reading a lot of Greek Myths. “I wanted it be an invocation to love,” she says.
“Often, when we think we’re in love, we’re just in love with love because we want that whole dizzying feeling.
“If Aphrodite turned her attention on you, it was considered an ambush and a form of madness. Passion makes you lose your senses.”
As the song draws to a close, Merchant reels off a string of familiar phrases to winning effect.
“Make me head over heels, make me drunk, make me blind/Over the moon, half out of my mind/Oh, make me weak in the knees, tremble inside.”
The eight-minute Sister Tilly is her heartfelt tribute to a certain type of woman from her parents’ generation.
It includes a shout-out to Joan Didion, the fearless American writer who died during the week Merchant was recording her vocals.
“That’s why I dedicated the entire album to her,” she says. “But Sister Tilly represents several women I’ve known. Some are gone but not all and they were like surrogate mothers to me.
“Many of them led bold, adventuresome lives and would tell me stories — ‘I lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the late Sixties’ or ‘Oh, I was hitchhiking in India in 1970’ or ‘I have a house in Oaxaca [city in Mexico] and spend winters there’.”
In the song, Merchant describes Sister Tilly’s bright yellow walls and pashmina shawls, how she has a voice like folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and listens to Led Zeppelin “so loud and proud”.
On Keep Your Courage as a whole, Merchant explores a variety of styles, typical of her eclectic approach to music.
Tower Of Babel has a silky soul vibe while Eye Of The Storm (featuring sublime Uilleann pipes) and the album’s only cover, Hunting The Wren by Irish band Lankum, are rooted in the folk tradition.
Merchant says Song Of Himself, her paean to 19th Century poet Walt Whitman, needed to be “bombastic” and “expansive” in keeping with the cultural colossus.
“Every time we tried fiddle and banjo, it sounded too Americana,” she says. “Whitman was more elegant. I couldn’t see him hanging out where banjos were being played.” Next we go back to where we started, The Feast Of Saint Valentine, which dwells on the contradictions of love.
Merchant recites the resounding payoff to me: “Love will be the curse and be the charm, love will be the bruising and the balm, love will set you free and love will be your bonds. Love will win. Love will conquer all.”
To her, it completes the album’s mission to create “a song cycle that maps the journey of a courageous heart”.
This helps explain why the cover is adorned with a striking statue of Joan Of Arc.
“To me, she represents courage and I would rather have her image than my face, which just means Natalie Merchant.”
Bearing in mind her health battles and though she won’t admit it herself, Keep Your Courage is one of the bravest albums you’re likely to hear.
Keep Your Courage is out now[/caption]
NATALIE MERCHANT
Keep Your Courage