Nokia’s “Ovi” hits a snag in Brazil.

Ah the classic story of two companies battling it out over naming rights. Today’s match up has Nokia with their “Ovi” mobile store pitted against Brazil and their ringtone/SMS news alert service dubbed “Ouvi”. Off the bat it’s worth noting that both Ovi and Ouvi are pronounced exactly the same. Nokia does have the deeper pockets as the company currently known as “Ouvi” is much smaller and therefore has less cavernous pockets. However, team Ouvi does have some legal weight on their side. The most notable aspect of Ouvi’s case is the fact that the registered the domain name “ovi.com.br” way back in 2004. So, who do you think will win. The deep pocketed Finnish favorite or the legally sound underdog?

IntoMobile > Reuters

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Facebook getting sued by owner of overly vague, overly infringed patent.

Copyrights are quickly becoming a joke these days as more and more “no-names” are coming out of the woodwork and suing multi-million dollar companies for…you guessed it…multiple millions of dollars. Facebook has been through their fair share of lawsuits. Though, if you own or manage a large successful company, lawsuits are a given. The latest legal venture for Facebook is rather pointless and again highlights the growing pains the U.S. copyright system is going through. The plaintiff, WhoGlue, is claiming Facebook infringes on their patent, patent # 7, 246, 164 which consists of:

Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods

Anyonne, even those who don’t really know what the internet is, already know the various sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Friendfeed, as well as countless other social networking services that I’m sure employ a very similar type of technology. Also high up on the “obviousness list” is the fact that the Facebook team came up with technologies used behind closed doors from their own minds as the patent being referenced is so vague it boggles my mind that it was even issued. But that’s the country we live in — if you can’t innovate of compete with the bigger players, take them to court and steal all of their money. Nonsense?

TechDirt

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