Apple has secured a major victory for its redesigned smartwatches as per the latest decision from the US International Trade Commission. The federal agency ruled against reinstating an import ban on Apple Watches, allowing the tech giant to continue selling its devices with a reworked blood-oxygen monitoring technology.

The ITC decided to terminate the case and refer to a preliminary ruling from one of its judges in March that claimed that Apple's redesigned smartwatches don't infringe on patents held by Masimo, the medical tech company that has long been embroiled in lawsuits surrounding the Apple Watch. Apple thanked the ITC in a statement, adding that "Masimo has waged a relentless legal campaign against Apple and nearly all of its claims have been rejected." We reached out to Masimo for comment and will update the story when we hear back.

The latest decision could offer some closure to the longstanding legal feud between Masimo and Apple. The patent battle dates back to 2021 with Masimo's first filing against Apple that requested an import ban on Apple Watches. The ITC ended up ruling that Apple violated Masimo's patents, resulting in the previous import ban and the Apple Watch maker redesigning the blood-oxygen reading feature in certain models. However, Masimo wasn't satisfied with this conclusion and sought another import ban on the updated Apple Watch models. Now that the ITC has ruled against that, Masimo is left with the option to appeal the decision with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

While Masimo may currently be on the losing side of this legal battle, it's confronting Apple on multiple fronts. In November, a federal jury sided with Masimo and ruled that Apple has to pay $634 million in a separate patent infringement case.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/apple-avoids-a-second-import-ban-for-its-redesigned-smartwatches-in-latest-court-ruling-175600668.html?src=rss

©

© REUTERS / Reuters

The open-source library and search engine Anna’s Archive has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three of the world’s largest music labels $322 million in damages after it claimed to have scraped the entirety of the streaming platform’s library of music.

Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, sued Anna’s Archive in January for a slightly comical $13 trillion. They alleged Anna's Archive had illegally scraped 86 million songs — a significant chunk of all the music on the planet — and intended to make them available for download via BitTorrent. At the time, Spotify called the scraping a "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings."

In a since-deleted blog post, Anna's Archive stated the scraping was an act of preservation. Still, a New York federal judge sided with the plaintiffs after the archive's anonymous operator failed to respond to the lawsuit.

The court order finding Anna's Archive guilty of direct copyright infringement, breach of contract and violation of the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) was filed on April 14. A further claim of violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was dismissed by the judge.

The total breakdown of damages includes $7.5 million to each of Sony and Universal Music and $7.2 million to Warner Music, with the remaining $300 million going to Spotify. The latter figure amounts to $2,500 for each of the 120,000 scraped music files already made available by Anna’s Archive. The remainder of the 86 million files were due to be released to the public at a later date.

The court also ordered Anna’s Archive to "immediately destroy all copies and phonorecords of any work ‘scraped,’ downloaded, copied or otherwise extracted from Spotify," but whether it actually does this, or indeed hands over a penny of the damages, remains to be seen. The bizarre reality of this case is that the person (or people) behind Anna’s Archive remains a mystery.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/annas-archive-told-to-pay-spotify-and-record-labels-322-million-over-unprecedented-music-scraping-151034032.html?src=rss

©

© Anadolu via Getty Images