3 Count: Patchwork Lawsuit

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1:  Federal Oracle-HP copyright fight kicks off in Silicon Valley

First off today, Natalie Hanson at Courthouse News Service reports that a trial between Oracle and Hewlett Packard (HP) has begun as Oracle accuses HP of infringing their rights to a variety of patches for the Solaris operating system.

According to Oracle, HP teamed up with a provider Terix to provide unauthorized patches to Solaris customers. This was in a bid to lure customers away from Oracle’s support services to HP’s. However, Terix has already been found liable for copyright infringement and has been ordered to pay $58 million to Oracle.

However, HP argues that many of the servers involved predate Oracle’s current contract system, making the patches legal. They also argue that, though they worked with Terix, they were unaware of the infringement and, furthermore, that the courts have held none of Terix’s partners were involved in any wrongdoing.

2:  Bungie Takes Another Shot at Cheat Seller AimJunkies in Court

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that video game maker Bungie has refiled a lawsuit against cheat maker AimJunkes alleging that, in their effort to make cheats for the video game Destiny 2, AimJunkies infringed upon their copyright.

The original lawsuit filed by Bungie was dismissed for providing lack of evidence that there was any copyright infringement in AimJunkies’ actions. However, the company has now decided to refile the case. In doing so, they have added a new defendant, Phoenix Digital and its managers, and new claims that the defendants reverse engineered Bungie code and accessed “copyrighted data structures” used for rendering in the game.

AimJunkies, for their part, no longer sells the cheats. The two sides had entered into settlement negotiations following the first filing, but those broke off after the judge ruled in favor of AimJunkies.

3: Marvel Confirms Conan the Barbarian is Leaving the Publisher

Finally today, Adam Barnhardt at Comicbook.com reports that Marvel Comics is losing the publishing rights to the character Conan the Barbarian.

Marvel has published comics featuring the character since 1969 and is currently running a series named King Conan that features it. However, the original rightsholders, Heroic Signatures, has announced that they plan on publishing their own line of comics featuring the character.

Though the character has jumped around some during the past 60 years, it has largely remained either at Marvel or Dark Horse Comics. However, Heroic Signatures is working to consolidate the rights it holds for a new publishing program that will start some time next year.

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