31
Mar
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Google's Android Market Copyright Infringement Form Wins The Troll Awards - Just Says 'crap' Upon Submission (Not An April Fool's Joke)

Posted by in Development, Google, News, Off-Topic

Among all the awesome (or really bad, depending on your mood) April Fool's jokes today, Google's web form for submitting Android Market copyright infringements towers above all, especially considering it's not a joke, at all. We really doubt that it's intentional because this behavior was present before April 1st arrived to California, and it is mind boggling that something like this would fall through the cracks and get past Google's Quality Assurance. Alas...

Upon submitting the relatively lengthy form that is meant to report copyright violations in the Market, instead of a Thank You message, the [most likely innocent smalltime] copyright holder is presented with the following:

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So, imagine that you spent hundreds of hours developing an application and suddenly found that someone ripped it off, stuffed it with ads, and submitted back to the Market.

24
Feb
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Trademark Research Fail Or Balls Of Steel? ChaCha Suing HTC For Trademark Infringement While Xoom Corp Is Going After Motorola

Posted by in Chacha, HTC, Motorola, News, XOOM

You would think that large hardware manufacturers, such as HTC and Motorola, would dedicate at least a few hours to trademark searches before naming their products and investing millions of dollars into promotional efforts for said products. That would be a fair assumption, right? It seems like the answer sometimes is: not exactly.

HTC ChaCha

Last week at MWC, HTC unveiled 6 new devices, one of which was bearing the name ChaCha (that's one of the Facebook phones). Unsurprisingly, exactly a week later, on February 22nd, ChaCha Search Inc, which owns the trademark ChaCha in the U.S. and Europe, filed a trademark infringement suit against HTC America.