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I'm not going to rehash it again, but the tl;dr in case you need it is that Huawei is on the U.S. Entity list which means other companies that wish to do business inside the U.S. cannot do business with Huawei unless they are granted a waiver. That means Google can't provide things like Google Play or Gmail on top of the free open source parts of Android. … [Read more...] about What’s bad for Huawei is good for companies like Xiaomi and Oppo

I am keenly aware that our first interaction with Google's redesigned navigation scheme comes as an opt-in toggle inside a developer beta, and that this is all subject to change — significantly. Indeed, Dave Burke, the head of Android's vast engineering team, admitted that he's already using a version of Android P with numerous usability upgrades over what was rolled out to developers and early adopters this week. … [Read more...] about Android P’s gestures are a jagged pill you should learn to swallow

One of the closest analogies might be the music industry's lawsuit against ReDigi, an online service that let users "re-sell" digital music tracks they had purchased online. Copyright's first sale doctrine has long allowed people to resell books, CDs, and other copyrighted works on physical media. ReDigi argued that the same principle should apply to digital files. But the courts didn't buy it. In 2018, an appeals court held that transmitting a music file across the Internet creates a new copy of the work rather than merely transferring an existing file to its new owner. That meant the first sale doctrine didn't apply. … [Read more...] about Internet Archive offers 1.4 million copyrighted books for free online

"[T]he main job of a federal judge is not to supervise settlements, and especially not to bully parties into settling their cases," he wrote. "The judge’s job is to decide cases, so that every member of the public, not only the parties, can benefit from the public resources that go into the judicial system." … [Read more...] about Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use (updated)

Canonical's enforcement of the trademark for Ubuntu put egg on the company's face last week when it went after a website critical of its approach to user privacy. A website called "Fix Ubuntu," which provides instructions for disabling an Internet search mechanism in the Ubuntu operating system, received a letter asking it to change its domain name and stop using the Ubuntu logo. The website is run by Micah Lee, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the EFF quickly informed Canonical that "the First Amendment fully protects the use of trademarked terms and logos in non-commercial websites that criticize and comment upon corporations and products." … [Read more...] about Ubuntu’s trademark folly fueled by confusion over law, EFF says