Microsoft Sues US Customs For Allowing Imports of Banned Motorola Phones 87
SmartAboutThings writes "Microsoft filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing the United States Customs of secretly meeting with Google representatives to allow imports of Motorola devices that are infringing on Microsoft's ActiveSync technology and therefore should be banned." The article lists 18 (older) Android devices that are named in the complaint; Xoom owners just got some street cred.
NSA tipped them off? (Score:5, Funny)
how did they find out?
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Probably one of the Balmer's (or Gate's) relatives brought one, and he noticed that on the last weekend's barbecue. =P
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Probably one of the Balmer's (or Gate's) relatives brought one, and he noticed that on the last weekend's barbecue. =P
Sounds like an rpg: "Balmer's Gate"
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Sounds like an rpg: "Balmer's Gate"
Or perhaps, some presidential scandal from the seventies! =D
Rogue Fed Departments? (Score:5, Informative)
From a Bloomberg article [bloomberg.com]: 'U.S. Customs and Border Protection, after having secret meetings with Google, continued to let the Motorola Mobility mobile phones enter the country even though Google has done nothing to remove the feature at the heart of the ITC case, Microsoft said in the complaint. The case illustrates what Lexmark International Inc. (LXK) and Lutron Electronics Co. in May called an “increasingly ineffective and unpredictable enforcement” of import bans imposed by the trade agency.'
Employing bureaucratic shortcuts is apparently alive and well. Does this point to corruption, or is it simply a matter of poor information flow?
Re:Rogue Fed Departments? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this point to corruption, or is it simply a matter of poor information flow?
Yes.
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if (isMan() || isWoman())
printf("yes");
Pretty hard for a person to not be able to answer yes.
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Or bad patents that should never have been granted in the first place?
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CIvil disobedience? From bureaucrats?
Only on your dreams... (And mine too, by the way!)...
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Two wrongs don't make a right.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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mandela said that nonviolent protest was ineffective against armed enforcement, while mlk (& ghandi) said that nonviolence was the only way to overthrow the oppressors. who was right?
Since we're analyzing, both MLK and Ghandi were assassinated. Does that tell us anything about the conundrum, other than Mandela outlived the others? Perhaps Mandela's many years in prison protected him from assassins, or maybe life's just a damned crap shoot.
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It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
Mahatma Gandhi
We've been cutting funding for this stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure kids. Have all the laws protecting you're rights you want. We control the purse strings, so we just won't fund enforcement.
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Over here, we've been having issues with public construction works. Due to budget slashing, more and more engineering is being outsourced to private firms. What this ended up doing is that at one point cities didn't have the internal knowledge and skills required to
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It's definitely one of them. Here's a little piece of insight: most problems have more than one cause, and fixing one cause is better than not fixing any. Sometimes you can't fix all the causes, so your best bet is to fix the ones that you can.
Over here, we've been having issues with public construction works. Due to budget slashing, more and more engineering is being outsourced to private firms. What this ended up doing is that at one point cities didn't have the internal knowledge and skills required to determine whether bids were realistic and weren't cutting corners or overcharging, which has led to a LOT of projects overrunning budgets (both time and money) dramatically or costing more than they should've. All of this to shave off what amounts to a few pennies in the grand scheme of things.
And in the province of Quebec, its even worse. The elected governments dipped into the contract awarded funds to the tune of 3%. Ergo, contracts had 3% added to their cost as an illegal funding of political parties. Moreover, Cruise ship vacations and golf tournaments in far away vacation resources insured that the contracts would only be divided between a select few companies. These companies got together and decided the winners, losers and the next go-arounders.
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...we've been slashing the budgets of these 'evil bureaucratic' for 30 years...
Yet the federal budget is the largest its EVER BEEN, and the defcit is now well over 16 billion dollars, the larget ever. Funny how that works. Also funny that Microsoft would sue the same org they've been working [slashdot.org] for.
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"well over 16 billlion dollars"??
Last I checked, the deficit is measured in TRILLIONs per year. A $16B deficit might be YESTERDAY'S deficit....
Deficit != Debt (Score:2)
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Minor nitpick though: it's 16742 [brillig.com] billion dollars at the moment, that's indeed well over 16 billion.
It's easy to get confused, because your 16 billion is how much your deficit grows per week.
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since the 80s. It always amazes me when people are surprised that laws aren't enforced when we've been slashing the budgets of these 'evil bureaucratic' for 30 years. Funny how the bureaucratic ain't evil when he's doing something you want done, ain't it? Buddy of mine is getting screwed over in the only job he could find. Starts life as an ardent anti-bureaucratic guy until he goes looking for the labor board to seek redress and finds out there isn't one.
Slashing budgets of border control agencies? What planet do you live on cause it sure ain't Earth?
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There's a big difference between "not being able to do the job" and "not doing the job". Microsoft is accusing them of the latter, and they're not the only ones to do so.
Re:Rogue Fed Departments? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the phone is bought legally in another country, what right have customs got to stop someone bringing a legal product (legal where it was bought) into the country. Next think you know they will try to impose US laws in other countries... oh yeah, sorry, they are already doing that.
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what right have customs got to stop someone bringing a legal product (legal where it was bought) into the country
Lmao -- seriously? did you even THINK about what you were writing?
Tell you what, why don't you try this little experiment:
1) Fly over to Amsterdam and buy ~10 kilos of Marijuana (it's legal there!).
2) Package it all up nice and securely and put it in your onboard luggage for your return trip.
3) Upon reaching customs, peacefully explain to them how they have "no right to stop someone bringing a legal (where it was purchased) product into the country".
4) Write us back and let us know how things went from ther
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> Fly over to Amsterdam and buy ~10 kilos of Marijuana (it's legal there!).
No it's not - an amount for personal use is free, and that is defined as X grams (don't know the exact number). 10 kg is certainly more than that.
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Drugs are prohibited by law, phones are not. Sorry if this concept is beyond you. Then again, if you had been capable of thought you would have noticed the tongue in cheek nature of the post but I do not want to stop you from looking idiotic.
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Actually, while your examples are technically correct, your reasoning is not. I have personally brought beer to the US from Canada that was not a product that is licensed to be imported into the US and had the customs guy not give one single solitary fuck. I have seen other people do the same thing with other alcohols that are not supposed to be imported to the US by license and guess what? They again did not care. In one case the guy brought like 3 fucking cases of rum from the Carribbean into one of th
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...that I can sue the border agency, or the U.S. customs agency for allowing cocain across the border, into my country?
You should have sued them for allowing guns to flow the other way on purpose..
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Imhofe (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who is Microsoft?
Still a monopolist whining that it got deposed.
Defy is on the list! (Score:2)
I like this tough old POS better every day. Been swimming with it. Blown metal chips off it with compressed air. It won't die.
Tell me about Activesync (Score:3, Insightful)
I have never done any of this, but you have to wonder if this is a home goal twinned with what should be an antitrust case. Google have dropped activesync.http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413283,00.asp (Anyone else forgot how pro Microsoft PCmag was)
The most ironic part of this Windows Phone users used to get gmail messages instantaneously...and now they don't...like Windows Phone was not already second class technology.
Technology(sic) like this should be used to give additional benefits to Microsoft Users not used to attack competing companies(and its own customers) in markets where...lets be honest its product continues to fail after 3 years (I remember when they had 10% of the smart-phone market)
Trying to Bullying companies as large...rich...popular...successful...like...Google is just stupid(Apple have behind closed doors agreement). Insane when their product occupies 75% of the market and yours occupies 3%.
The bottom line is even if these product were banned...Windows Phone would have remained a failure, not its a little more likely to continue to be.
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The most funny (or not!) part of all this mess is that my Palm LifeDrive already did all that almost 10 years ago.
The only and sorely difference is that it was done using WiFi and not by 3G or GPRS (as my Android does right now, as I don't want to pay the outrageous fess of my countries's 3G services).
Outdated and misleading post... (Score:2)
. Google have dropped activesync.http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413283,00.asp (Anyone else forgot how pro Microsoft PCmag was)
The most ironic part of this Windows Phone users used to get gmail messages instantaneously...and now they don't...like Windows Phone was not already second class technology.
Outdated news... Google has dropped nothing.
"Google Extends Windows Phone Exchange ActiveSync Support Until July"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414917,00.asp [pcmag.com]
Microsoft announced today that Google has agreed to delay the removal of support for Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol (Google Sync) until July.
In the meantime, Microsoft said it is working to build support for the protocols Google will be using going forward, meaning Windows Phone users will still be able to connect to Google services.
Please stop twisting facts or posting misleading stories to further your agenda. Your entire post is bunk.
Microsoft should be banned (Score:1)
Oh, and Oracle.
Except that is not what happened (Score:2)
Giant douchebag US megacorp calls out anoother giant douchebag US megacorp for being giant douchebags. Free world doesn't care, wherever that is. Next up, the weather.
Nothing like as close. Aged PC dinosaur and convicted monopoly successfully got a new PC companies hardware products effectively banned for using patents that allow interacting with its own proprietary software. It did so by only *one* patent of nine being upheld.
This is about that ban not being upheld...and the claims of deals being done behind closed doors with of all people the US customs. So nothing like you said.
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Are you asking for permission, or trying to hire assassins?
If you're not invited, it's secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because someone doesn't voluntarily invite you to a meeting does not mean that it's secret.
I think, "United States Customs has met with Google representatives to allow imports of Motorola devices" is more accurate.
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That's what I was thinking. "If they're secret meetings, how does MS know that they happened?"
It was fun thinking of Ballmer hunched over a keyboard in the dark, face pale in the light of an old CRT that spilled onto the painted-cinderblock wall behind him and gleaming on the tinfoil wrapped round his head as he punched furiously on the keyboard as he tried to convince an X-Files newsgroup "I'M TELLING YOU! It's happening!!!!1!"
Incomplete information (Score:5, Informative)
TFA fails to mention that the ITC ruling provides a 60-day review period, during which Moto posts a bond of $0.33 per device imported. That period expires Monday. So far they've not done anything wrong. They could simply stop importing those models prior to Monday, surrender the bond, and be in full compliance with the ITC order.
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That period expired last year. Post anything anti-MS, get upvoted on Slashdot regardless of truth. This site is a joke.
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You're off by a year. The 60-day period expired in July 2012. Which was 60 days after the ban went into effect, back in May 2012.
Also, that stuff you mentioned wasn't in the article. It was in an article that was linked from the article. This one [cnet.com], to be precise, which is clearly timestamped "May 18, 2012 2:34 PM PDT".
So yeah, they may very well be doing something wrong, since that 60-day period expired quite awhile ago.
Sue Microsoft (Score:2)
Phones enjoying H-1B status too! (Score:1)
Hey Microsof, maybe the Motorla phones are enjoying H-1B status too! Shut-up and feel the pain!
really? (Score:2)
no one ever won a war with their customers (Score:2)