China Deal Gives Apple Big Market to Court

On Sunday, Apple and China Mobile announced a deal to bring the iPhone to the Chinese carrier, the largest wireless network in the world, on Jan. 17.

An agreement with China Mobile could, at least initially, give Apple a big lift into the vast Chinese market, analysts say, increasing its worldwide sales.

“China is an extremely important market for Apple and our partnership with China Mobile presents us the opportunity to bring iPhone to the customers of the world’s largest network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement.

But the company will face many challenges in capturing the Chinese market.

While Apple’s smartphones are dominant in the United States and a major player in Europe, the company has struggled to gain much traction in China, where phones using Google’s Android operating system dominate for several reasons, particularly price.

In China, some smartphone makers, like Huawei, Coolpad and ZTE, offer Android phones for less than $100, while Apple lists the iPhone 5C at $739, and the 5S at $871. Apple said that it would reveal pricing of the iPhones for China Mobile customers at a later date.

Apple is the No. 5 smartphone player in the country, behind Samsung and the Chinese handset makers Huawei, Lenovo and Yulong.

The slow sales of the iPhone in China are reflected in the overall shrinkage of the company’s share of the global smartphone market — to 12.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 14.3 percent in the same period a year ago, according to the market research firm Gartner. Meanwhile, Lenovo, the No. 3 player, which sells the vast majority of its smartphones in China, had 5.1 percent of the global market in the third quarter, from 4.1 percent a year ago. Samsung’s global share remained flat at 32.1 percent.

Still, analysts were optimistic that Apple would sell a lot of phones through China Mobile, though they offered wide-ranging estimates for how many more. William V. Power, an analyst for Robert W. Baird & Company, said Apple could sell as many as 30 million more iPhones in 2014, while Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein research, offered a more conservative estimate of 15 million iPhones.

Apple sold about 23 million iPhones in China over the last year, Mr. Sacconaghi said.

Apple has long pursued a deal with China Mobile. The carrier showed signs of warming up to Apple only after it began losing customers to competitors that offered the iPhone. The No. 2 carrier in the country, China Unicom, and China Telecom, No. 3, have had longstanding arrangements with Apple, but they are much smaller than China Mobile.

In addition to cost, another reason Android phones have proved so popular in China is that, unlike in the rest of the world, there is a wider variety of mobile applications for Android phones than for iPhones. While the Google Play store is not officially available in China, Android users can turn to dozens of alternative app stores offering licensed and pirated applications.

Analysts expect the vast majority of smartphone growth in China to occur at the lower end of the market, as the phones become more widely available to lower-income consumers in smaller cities and rural areas. Those consumers will presumably be more attracted to the lower-cost Android phones.

Also, in China fewer handsets are subsidized by mobile carriers than in the United States, Europe or Japan. More than two-thirds of Chinese phones are sold unsubsidized by third-party retailers, often over the Internet.

Chinese operators are reluctant to subsidize phones too heavily in a market where many customers are happy with smartphones that cost under $100. Both China Unicom and China Telecom have been cutting back on subsidies.

Apple surprised some analysts in September with its aggressive pricing of the iPhone 5C, which has fewer features and costs less than the 5S, though the two were introduced on the same day. The company had been expected to try to appeal to Chinese customers with the lower price, but the 5C was introduced at a level that remains high in China.

Analysts say Apple may have to cut the price further, or introduce another, less expensive model if it hopes to broaden its appeal in China.

The cost-consciousness of Chinese consumers extends to their choice of mobile networks. Only 176 million China Mobile customers, less than a quarter of the total, subscribe to the company’s high-speed wireless data service, using 3G technology.

Apple and China Mobile announced their partnership a few days after China Mobile introduced an upgrade to a newer, faster system — 4G — for parts of its network. The existing 3G subscribers, not the overall customer base, will provide the main target audience for the new phones and services.

The deal with China Mobile has been rumored for a while, and potential customers for the iPhone are already lining up. Among them is Wang Xiaocong, who works in the marketing department of a law firm in Beijing. Ms. Wang, 31, said she had a BlackBerry for work and a Samsung smartphone for personal use, but was looking for something different.

“I am not a big fan of high-tech products,” Ms. Wang said. “But I would love to have an iPhone next time, with the 4G network, maybe next year. It looks very fashionable.”

Shanshan Wang contributed reporting.

DealBook: Icahn Heads to Court With a Point About Dell

New Jersey Supreme Court Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data

The ruling puts the state at the forefront of efforts to define the boundaries around a law enforcement practice that a national survey last year showed was routine, and typically done without court oversight or public awareness. With lower courts divided on the use of cellphone tracking data, legal experts say, the issue is likely to end up before the United States Supreme Court.

The New Jersey decision also underscores the extent of the battles over government intrusion into personal data in a quickly advancing digital age, from small town police departments to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of e-mail and cellphone conversations.

Several states and Congress are considering legislation to require that warrants based on probable cause be obtained before investigators can get cellphone data. Montana recently became the first state to pass such a measure into law. The California Legislature approved a similar bill in 2012, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, saying it did not “strike the right balance” between the needs of law enforcement and the rights of citizens.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in May that the police could seize a cellphone without a warrant, but needed a warrant to search it. And a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., is weighing whether investigators acted legally when they got a court order, but not a warrant, to obtain 221 days of cellphone location data for suspects in an armed robbery case in Maryland.

“This type of issue will play out in many jurisdictions for the simple reason that cellphones are so prevalent in daily life,” said Peter G. Verniero, a former New Jersey attorney general and State Supreme Court justice. “The decision affects just about everybody.”

“Law enforcement is trying to keep up with technology, as well they should,” he added. “It’s very legitimate for law enforcement to use technology, but this court decision is a strong reminder that constitutional standards still apply. The courts have to adapt, and law enforcement has to adapt.”

The ruling involved a case that began with a string of burglaries in homes in Middletown, N.J. A court ordered the tracing of a cellphone that had been stolen from one home, which led to a man in a bar in nearby Asbury Park, who said his cousin had sold him the phone, and had been involved in burglaries. The police then used data they got from T-Mobile to locate the suspect, Thomas W. Earls, at three points on a subsequent evening, tracking him to a motel room where he was found with a television and suitcases full of stolen goods.

In a unanimous decision, the State Supreme Court said that when people entered cellphone contracts, “they can reasonably expect that their personal information will remain private.”

The justices recognized that this departed somewhat from federal case law. But they relied in part on a United States Supreme Court decision last year that the police could not attach a Global Positioning System to a suspect’s car without a warrant. A cellphone, the New Jersey justices said, was like a GPS device.

“Using a cellphone to determine the location of its owner can be far more revealing than acquiring toll billing, bank, or Internet subscriber records,” said the opinion, written by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. “Details about the location of a cellphone can provide an intimate picture of one’s daily life and reveal not just where people go — which doctors, religious services and stores they visit — but also the people and groups they choose to affiliate with. That information cuts across a broad range of personal ties with family, friends, political groups, health care providers and others.”

Besides establishing a firmer legal bar for the police to obtain cellphone data, the Supreme Court also remanded the case to the appeals court to determine whether the evidence collected using the cellphone records could be admitted in court under an “emergency aid exception” to the requirement for a warrant.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reviewed records from more than 200 local police departments, large and small, and found that they were aggressively using cellphone tracking data, so much so that some cellphone companies were marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments, to track suspects or even to download text messages sent to a phone that had been turned off. Departments were using the information for emergency and nonemergency cases.

Some departments had manuals advising officers not to reveal the practice to the public. Others defended its use. The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, had used a cellphone locator to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

The law has been slow to keep up. The Florida decision in May rejected the reasoning of a lower court that had based its approval of cellphone tracking on a 1973 United States Supreme Court case that allowed heroin found in a suspect’s cigarette pack to be introduced as evidence. “Attempting to correlate a crumpled package of cigarettes to the cellphones of today is like comparing a one-cell organism to a human being,” the decision said.

Nationally, court decisions about cellphone tracking have considered whether it comports with the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the justices in New Jersey based their decision on the State Constitution, which affords greater privacy protection. The state court has previously ruled in favor of electronic privacy. In 2008, it said that police had to obtain a subpoena from a grand jury to obtain Internet provider records.

“The inescapable logic of this decision should be influential beyond New Jersey because it makes complete sense as to an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” said Rubin Sinins, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Bits Blog: Secret Court Declassifies Yahoo’s Role in Disclosure Fight

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As Social Media Swirl Around It, Supreme Court Sticks to Its Analog Ways

They will be joined, if Twitter is any guide, by thousands of anxious, curious people across the country eagerly waiting for the court to rule on a remarkable number of major cases with huge implications. With just days remaining in its 2013 schedule, the court has left dangling its considered opinions on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the nation’s voting rights laws.

“We all crave information instantaneously,” said Ms. Blatt, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who has argued 33 cases before the court, including one that is still pending this year. Last Monday, and again last Thursday, she found herself scouring legal blogs, looking for whatever clues might exist.

“I always thought those people were strange, and there I was, doing it,” she said. “People are dying to know something that they can’t.”

In a city beset by leaks — a young programmer recently gave a hoard of top-secret documents to newspapers — the high court’s annual rulings remain stubbornly opaque until they are handed out (on paper, first) by the court’s public relations staff. Meanwhile, the nine justices have the luxury of appearing publicly oblivious to the swirl of social media, the angst of Washington’s legal community and the voracious appetite of America’s 24-hour news cycle.

Many Washington institutions are making the high-tech transition; even the chairman of the Federal Reserve holds regular news conferences now. But like the Kremlinologists of the cold war, who deduced Communist power struggles by a leader’s presence on the Red Square reviewing stand, modern-day court watchers can do little more than speculate about when and how the court might rule.

“You never know when it’s going to come down,” said Mr. Olson, a former solicitor general who would know, if anyone would. A court observer for decades, he has shown up on each of the last three decision days at the court. “I just try to prepare for anything.”

Mr. Griffin is a founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization that filed the legal challenge to Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California. Four times in the last two weeks, the court has issued decisions in other cases but not about that law’s constitutionality. Each time, Mr. Griffin has returned home and unpacked, lest his suits become wrinkled.

On Monday, Mr. Griffin will return once again, joined by the four plaintiffs in the case, who plan to stay in Washington until the high court rules, before they return home to California. If the court overturns the ballot initiative, the couples hope to have a wedding ceremony as soon as possible.

Across California, gay rights organizations have started many early mornings refreshing their Web pages for news and then going back to bed. Staff members at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center have elaborate plans for action after any outcome, and they are preparing to head into the office in the early morning as they anticipate widespread celebration or protest in West Hollywood.

And lawyers at the office of California’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, have been preparing for weeks with legal memos anticipating a wide range of possible outcomes.

The Web is ready, too. On Thursday, after the justices once again did not issue rulings in any of the biggest cases, news organizations blared the “news” to their followers. “BREAKING NEWS: No major decisions from Supreme Court today,” the Yahoo News site announced on its Twitter feed. Another Twitter user wryly observed: “Clearly all Supreme Court judges were unpopular kids in high school and, excited by all the attention now, are gonna drag this out.”

A year ago, in the minutes before the court announced its decision on President Obama’s health care law, Twitter users posted more than 13,000 messages a minute about the court. (By comparison, there were 160,000 a minute at the height of the presidential debate in Denver last year.)

The court’s term is dwindling fast. The schedule calls for a round of rulings on Monday, and court observers believe the justices may issue decisions on Wednesday and Thursday as well. There has been speculation of a July 1 session, though Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is scheduled to teach a class on the history of the Supreme Court in Prague on July 2.

There will be other issues in Washington this week. The Senate is set to take a final vote on an immigration overhaul, perhaps on Thursday. (If the court overturns the federal Defense of Marriage Act first, lawmakers may not need to seek immigration protections for same-sex partners of immigrants, advocates said.)

But most of the intellectual guesswork will be about the justices and their rulings.

There are ways, if you know them, to offer educated guesses about the timing and authorship (if not the substance) of the court’s coming decisions. The tricks have become de rigueur among the Washington social set, whose members swap Supreme Court theories at cocktail parties the way Angelenos swap movie industry gossip.

“Everybody around this time starts to try to predict who has the decision and what it’s going to say,” said Irving L. Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University. Mr. Gornstein calls himself a “participant” in the court-guessing parlor games. This year, he said, is the worst he can remember.

“Here you have four huge cases, which is really extraordinary for a Supreme Court term,” Mr. Gornstein said. “I can’t remember when you’ve had this many cases at the end of a term.”

Among the tricks of the court-watching trade is knowing that each of the justices is assigned to write the majority opinion in at least one case during each two-week “sitting,” when cases are heard for oral arguments. On Monday, if there are rulings yet to be announced from a particular sitting, and a justice who has not yet written an opinion from that set of cases, that justice might be a good bet.

Knowledgeable observers also keep close watch on the number of boxes of rulings set out by the public information officers at the court. The more boxes, the more rulings.

“It is a game that everybody’s playing because it’s so important,” Mr. Olson said. “These decisions are really important to the people involved, and they have consequences for a long time.”

Adam Liptak contributed reporting from Washington, and Jennifer Medina from Los Angeles.

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a request authorized by the Stored Communications Act.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 15, 2013

An article on Friday about technology companies’ discomfort with and challenges of government surveillance programs misstated the type of order to remain silent about an information request successfully challenged by Twitter in 2011. It was an order authorized by the Stored Communications Act, not a National Security Letter.

Bits Blog: Secret Surveillance Court May Reveal Some Secrets

The secret court that adjudicates national security-related information requests lifted the veil on its operations a tiny bit on Wednesday, ruling that portions of one of its earlier opinions could be disclosed to the public.

The ruling came in a case by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. It had pressed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow one of its opinions to be disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request. The government argued that there is good reason to keep the case sealed.

The court said it saw no reason to prohibit disclosing the documents sought under the Freedom of Information request. It left it to a federal court in the District of Columbia to make a ruling on the specific Freedom of Information Act litigation.

In other words, the court said it would not stand in the way of another court, if it ruled in favor of the organization’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“The victory today was a modest one,” E.F.F. wrote in a blog post announcing the decision.

The actions of the court have been the subject of fierce public debate ever since last week’s disclosures, first reported in The Guardian and The Washington Post, of widespread telephone and Internet surveillance efforts authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. On Tuesday, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the Senate calling for the Attorney General to declassify portions of the surveillance court’s opinions, at least its interpretations of the law.

“It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are interpreted, enforced, and adjudicated in complete secrecy,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, one of the co-sponsors of the bill said in a statement.

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, earlier this year asked the court to summarize its major opinions, at least explaining its legal reasoning, while excising the classified facts of the case. The court’s chief justice, Reggie B. Walton, wrote back, explaining why that was not feasible. For one thing, the judge said, summaries would miss out on “the more nuanced or technical point of a court’s analysis.” He added, “For FISC opinions specifically, there is also the very real problem of separating the classified facts from the legal analysis.”

Bits Blog: Secret Court Ruling in 2008 Put Technology Companies in Bind

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional, Claire Cain Miller reports in The New York Times.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

Bits: Court Ruling Takes a Stand on Essential High-Tech Patents

Joe Kohen/Invision for Xbox, via Associated Press Online game consoles like the Xbox use patented technology that is essential to its function.

The high-tech patents wars are fed by the value of patents as weapons for extracting rich sums from companies and competitors.

But courts are blunting the patent weapon, at least for the kinds of patents deemed vital for communications and data-handling in devices like smartphones, tablets and online game consoles. That trend took another step with an opinion issued last Thursday by a judge for the United States District Court in Seattle.

In his 207-page ruling, Judge James L. Robart took on the issue of pricing for so-called standard-essential patents. These are patents that their corporate owners have pledged to license to others on terms that are “reasonable and nondiscriminatory,” often known as RAND. All well and good, but what is reasonable to the owner might seem like extortion to the licensee, depending on the price. That kind of standoff becomes more likely if the two companies negotiating are rivals in the marketplace.

With clear prose and some clever math, Judge Robart concluded that when a company has made a RAND commitment to an industry standards organization, the price should be low. That is especially important, he said, for the intellectual property in complex digital devices that are bundles of many hardware and software technologies.

The ruling, according to Arti K. Rai, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, “fits into a long line of recent cases in which courts are squarely rejecting attempts by patentees to claim high reasonable royalty figures when the patent in question is a just a small piece of the product.”

The case in federal court in Seattle is a breach-of-contract dispute between Microsoft and Motorola, whose mobile phone unit, Motorola Mobility, Google bought in 2011 for $12.5 billion. Google picked up 17,000 patents in the deal, which closed last year.

In essence, Microsoft argued that Motorola bargained in bad faith by initially offering outlandish terms to license its patents on a wireless communication standard, 802.11, and another standard for video compression, H264.

Microsoft contends that Motorola’s first offer, if applied to a wide range of Microsoft products, might result in royalty payments of more than $4 billion a year. Motorola has replied in court that opening offers are nearly always negotiated down substantially, and that Motorola was mainly seeking a license deal on Microsoft’s Xbox video console rather than Microsoft’s wider product portfolio.

Still, Judge Robart determined that a reasonable rate for licensing the Motorola patents would be just under $1.8 million a year. That is not far from what Microsoft was offering as reasonable, about $1.2 million a year.

In his ruling, the judge set out some basic principles. An important one, he said, is that “a RAND royalty should be set at a level consistent with the S.S.O.s’ (standard setting organizations) goal of promoting widespread adoption of their standards.”

Later, Judge Robart explained the problem with relatively high royalties on standard-essential patents. He noted that at least 92 companies and organizations hold patents involved in the 802.11 standard for wireless communication. If they all sought the same terms as Motorola, he wrote, “the aggregate royalty to implement the 802.11 standard, which is only one feature of the Xbox product, would exceed the total product price.”

Judge Robart’s ruling covers only one part of one patent case — a price for reasonable licensing terms on Motorola’s patents. And the case is continuing. But his opinion, said Jorge L. Contreras, an associate professor of law at American University, detailed “some overarching principles that apply in cases like this. He emphasized that there was a social good that should be taken into account, and what is good for the whole market, not just for the two parties involved in the litigation.”

The ruling, Mr. Contreras added, “makes the big picture a lot clearer.”

Supreme Court Eases Import and Sale of Copyrighted Products

WASHINGTON — In a pair of decisions issued on Tuesday, the Supreme Court made it easier to import textbooks and other copyrighted products from abroad and made it harder for plaintiffs in class-action suits to stay out of federal court.

The copyright case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, No. 11-697, arose from the activities of a Thai student who attended Cornell University and the University of Southern California. The student, Supap Kirtsaeng, helped pay for his education by selling textbooks that his friends and relatives had bought in Thailand at low prices and shipped to him.

A publisher of some of the textbooks, John Wiley & Sons, sued Mr. Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement, and it won $600,000 in the lower courts. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court threw out that award and ruled that imported copyrighted goods were subject to the same rules as goods bought in the United States: owners of particular copies can do what they like with them.

In legal jargon, the court applied the first-sale doctrine to copyrighted materials from abroad. Under that doctrine, buyers of books, records and other copyrighted goods may lend or sell them as they wish.

The decision will have consequences for all manner of products, including books, records, art and software. Industry groups had told the justices that a decision permitting copyrighted foreign goods to be sold in the United States would limit their ability to sell materials more cheaply in developing markets and result in higher prices overall.

The case turned on a phrase in the Copyright Act, which limits the first-sale doctrine to works “lawfully made under this title.” The lower courts said that textbooks manufactured outside the United States could not have been made under American law and so remained subject to the control of the owner of the copyright.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said the phrase was not concerned with geography. He said he doubted “that Congress would have intended to create the practical copyright-related harms with which a geographical interpretation would threaten ordinary scholarly, artistic, commercial and consumer activities.”

Much of his opinion concerned the potential consequences of a contrary ruling, one that he said “could prevent a buyer from domestically selling or even giving away copies of a video game made in Japan, a film made in Germany or a dress (with a design copyright) made in China.”

He buttressed the point by surveying supporting briefs from libraries, used-book dealers, technology companies and museums, all of which warned that allowing copyright suits over goods imported from abroad would have pernicious consequences. Libraries could be barred from lending foreign books, the briefs said, and museums from displaying foreign art.

In their own briefs, Wiley and its allies discounted this “parade of horribles” as unrealistic. Justice Breyer responded, “We are not so sanguine.” The possible practical problems of ruling the other way, he said, “are too serious, too extensive and too likely to come about for us to dismiss them as insignificant — particularly in light of the ever-growing importance of foreign trade to America.”

An aside in a 1998 decision suggested that the court would rule differently on Tuesday, but Justice Breyer said the court was free to ignore a statement made in passing. “Is the court having once written dicta calling a tomato a vegetable bound to deny that it is a fruit forever after?” he asked.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and, for the most part, Justice Antonin Scalia, dissented, saying the majority’s “bold departure from Congress’s design” was “stunning.” She added that there were many ways to address “the anticipated horribles” that Justice Breyer had outlined.

“It should not be overlooked,” she wrote, “that the ability to prevent importation of foreign-made copies encourages copyright owners such as Wiley to offer copies of their works at reduced prices to consumers in less developed countries who might otherwise be unable to afford them.”

In the class action case, Standard Fire Insurance Company v. Knowles, No. 11-1450, the court unanimously ruled that plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot avoid the requirements of a federal law that allows some kinds of class actions to be moved from state to federal court by promising to accept less money than the class might be owed.

The law, the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, allows defendants to move some big class actions out of state courts thought to be hostile to business interests as long as the proposed class has more than 100 members, at least one of them is from a different state than a defendant and the amount at stake is more than $5 million.

The case concerned the Standard Fire Insurance Company, which is based in Connecticut and was accused in a proposed class action filed in Arkansas of failing to make full reimbursements for property damage claims. The plaintiffs’ lawyers stipulated that they would limit to $5 million the amount sought by the lead plaintiff and the class he sought to represent.

Justice Breyer, writing for the court, said the tactic would not work. “Stipulations must be binding,” he wrote. But, he said, “a plaintiff who files a proposed class action cannot legally bind members of the proposed class before the class is certified.”

Italian Appeals Court Acquits 3 Google Executives in Privacy Case

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Italian Appeals Court Acquits 3 Google Executives in Privacy Case

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Court Cases Challenge Border Searches of Laptops and Phones

The government has historically had broad power to search travelers and their property at the border. But that prerogative is being challenged as more people travel with extensive personal and business information on devices that would typically require a warrant to examine.

Several court cases seek to limit the ability of border agents to search, copy and even seize travelers’ laptops, cameras and phones without suspicion of illegal activity.

“What we are asking is for a court to rule that the government must have a good reason to believe that someone has engaged in wrongdoing before it is allowed to go through their electronic devices,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing plaintiffs in two lawsuits challenging digital border searches.

A decision in one of those suits, Abidor v. Napolitano, is expected soon, according to the case manager for Judge Edward R. Korman, who is writing the opinion for the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

In that case, Pascal Abidor, who is studying for his doctorate in Islamic studies, sued the government after he was handcuffed and detained at the border during an Amtrak trip from Montreal to New York. He was questioned and placed in a cell for several hours. His laptop was searched and kept for 11 days.

According to government data, these types of searches are rare: about 36,000 people are referred to secondary screening by United States Customs and Border Protection daily, and roughly a dozen of those travelers are subject to a search of their electronic devices.

Courts have long held that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches do not apply at the border, based on the government’s interest in combating crime and terrorism. But Mr. Pascal’s lawsuit and similar cases question whether confiscating a laptop for days or weeks and analyzing its data at another site goes beyond the typical border searches. They also depart from the justification used in other digital searches, possession of child pornography.

“We’re getting more into whether this is targeting political speech,” Ms. Crump said.

In another case the A.C.L.U. is arguing, House v. Napolitano, border officials at Chicago O’Hare Airport confiscated a laptop, camera and USB drive belonging to David House, a computer programmer, and kept his devices for seven weeks.

The lawsuit charges that Mr. House was singled out because of his association with the Bradley Manning Support Network. Pfc. Bradley Manning is a former military intelligence analyst accused of leaking thousands of military and diplomatic documents to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.

In March, Judge Denise J. Casper of Federal District Court in Massachusetts denied the government’s motion to dismiss the suit, saying that although the government did not need reasonable suspicion to search someone’s laptop at the border, that power did not strip Mr. House of his First Amendment rights. Legal scholars say this ruling could set the stage for the courts to place some limits on how the government conducts digital searches.

“The District Court basically said you don’t need individualized suspicion to search an electronic device at the border,” said Patrick E. Corbett, a professor of criminal law and procedure at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich. “What they were troubled with was the fact that the government held these devices for 49 days.”

Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, declined to discuss the policy in an interview, but a spokeswoman for the agency said in an e-mail: “Keeping Americans safe and enforcing our nation’s laws in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen all materials — electronic or otherwise — entering the United States. We are committed to ensuring the rights and privacies of all people while making certain that D.H.S. can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”

The statement also referred to the agency’s policy on border searches of electronic devices, which says that officers can keep these devices for a “reasonable period of time,” including at an off-site location, and seek help from other government agencies to decrypt, translate or interpret the information they contain. If travelers choose not to share a password for a device, the government may hold it to find a way to gain access to the data.

Court Upholds F.C.C. Rule on Use of Data Networks

WASHINGTON — Cellphone companies must allow customers of competing wireless carriers to use their networks for the Internet and e-mail when outside their home territory, a federal appeals court said here on Tuesday.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that just as the Federal Communications Commission required wireless carriers to allow voice-service roaming by customers of other carriers, it also can require the same, at commercially reasonable rates, for data customers — in essence, those who use smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices.

The judges’ 3-to-0 decision is a significant victory for the F.C.C. The agency has lost authority over Internet communications in recent years. And it is a big win for smaller cellphone companies, who now have the leeway to offer customers national calling and data plans, albeit ones that could generate extra charges.

On the losing side is Verizon Wireless, which had challenged the agency’s data roaming order in 2011. The company argued that the agency did not have authority to oversee data communications on wireless broadband networks and that it was imposing “common carrier” regulations on companies — essentially, regulating them like public utilities, as it does with home phone service.

Verizon said that it already had data roaming agreements so there was no need to codify the practice. “As we made clear throughout the case,” Ed McFadden, a company spokesman, said on Tuesday, “Verizon Wireless regularly enters into such data roaming agreements on commercially reasonable terms to meet the needs of consumers, and will continue to do so.”

The decision has broad implications for the agency, analysts said. “This does bode well for the F.C.C.’s ability to assert its authority in regulating wireless services,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president and policy director for the Media Access Project, a nonprofit law firm that promotes consumer choice. “This is the first time these issues have come up in the context of data, which obviously is our future,” he said.

The F.C.C.’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, went further, saying the court’s opinion “confirms the F.C.C.’s authority to promote broadband competition and protect broadband consumers.”

In 2010, in Comcast v. the F.C.C., the same appeals court rejected the legal theory that the agency was using to validate its regulation of broadband Internet service. While Tuesday’s decision does not reverse that ruling, it does signal that the agency may have found a justification for its broadband rules.

Both Tuesday’s and the 2010 decisions were written by one of the appeals court’s more liberal members, Judge David S. Tatel.

John Bergmayer, senior staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, which filed a brief supporting the agency, noted that many of the legal arguments Verizon made in the case are also part of another challenge in the same court.

There, Verizon is trying to overturn the agency’s Open Internet order, a 2011 regulation that contains elements of net neutrality rules. Those rules require Internet service providers to treat all traffic equally, rather than favoring some transmissions over another.

The Open Internet case is in its early stages and has not yet been argued before the appeals court. But agency officials say they think the appeals court, in Tuesday’s case, rejected at least one of the arguments Verizon makes in the Open Internet case.

Many small wireless companies had supported the agency’s data roaming requirement, saying that it would provide more competition, particularly by allowing them to offer national service to compete with Verizon and AT&T.

The large wireless providers argued that the data roaming order gave them less incentive to invest in their networks, because it would benefit rivals that would not shoulder any of the costs of building infrastructure.

Philippine Court Suspends Contentious Internet Law

“We respect and will abide by it,” Justice Secretary Leila de Lima wrote in a text message to reporters on Tuesday, referring to the court’s unanimous decision to suspend enforcement of the law for 120 days. “Our advocacy for a safe cyberspace and interdiction of organized crime will continue.”

Fifteen petitions were filed with the court opposing the law, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which took effect Oct. 3. A spokeswoman for the high court, Maria Victoria Gleoresty Guerra, said the government had 10 days to file an initial response to the petitions. Oral arguments are scheduled for Jan. 15, she said.

The law establishes penalties for various computer-related crimes, including child pornography, identity theft, online fraud and illegally accessing computer networks. It also makes online libel punishable by imprisonment, which critics said could result in the criminalization of common activities like sharing Facebook and Twitter posts.

Critics also said that the law gave the government wide-ranging powers to amass information on Internet users and to block Web sites. The passage of the law was followed by a public outcry, including street protests, social media campaigns and the hacking of government Web sites.

Senator Edgardo J. Angara, the author of the legislation in the Senate, said he welcomed the suspension so that the law could be publicly debated and better understood.

“What the Cybercrime Prevention Act does is only to regulate socially destructive acts,” Mr. Angara said, “because you cannot enjoy your right fully and confidently if others have an equal right to interfere with your right.”

Others pledged to fight until the law is repealed or struck down by the Supreme Court.

“A temporary restraining order, unanimously issued, is the first victory in our battle to defend our freedom and right of expression,” said Senator Teofisto D. Guingona III, who voted against the measure. “For a court to issue a T.R.O. unanimously is a strong message of its belief that the dangers and fears of the people are real and must be addressed.”

Human Rights Watch called Tuesday for the high court to strike down the law and for any new Internet legislation to be debated openly.

“All provisions in Philippine law that allow for imprisonment for peaceful expression should be repealed,” said Brad Adams, the organization’s Asia director.

Malaysian Court Says Publishing a Newspaper Is a Right

A Malaysian court ruled on Monday that the government should not have rejected an application for a print publishing license by Malaysiakini, a popular independent news Web site, said Shanmuga Kanesalingam, a lawyer who represented Malaysiakini. Under Malaysian law, a newspaper must obtain a permit from the government before it can publish.

Free-speech advocates hailed the decision as a victory.

“Recognition that the right to publish a newspaper is a fundamental right is very, very significant,” Mr. Shanmuga said. “It’s the first time we’ve had this said by a judge.”

Masjaliza Hamzah, executive officer of the Center for Independent Journalism in Kuala Lumpur, described the decision as “a very progressive judgment for freedom of expression, for freedom of the press in Malaysia.”

“It’s very significant,” she said, because few new permits for print newspapers have been granted in recent years.

“The permits that have been given out are mostly for small-scale publications, but not for the kind of publication that could garner a national audience, which Malaysiakini could,” Ms. Masjaliza said.

The government has not yet decided whether to appeal the decision, said Noor Hisham bin Ismail, a senior federal counsel involved in the case. It has a month to file.

Although the Internet has remained relatively free in Malaysia, most large newspapers are either owned by the government or linked to it.

Mr. Shanmuga said the court had ruled that the home minister, who grants publishing permits, must reconsider Malaysiakini’s application in accordance with the law.

He said the ruling would make it more difficult for the government to refuse an application for a printing license, because it requires officials to show that the proposed publication would be a threat to public order or to national security, or would be immoral.

Premesh Chandran, co-founder and chief executive of Malaysiakini, said he hoped the company’s application for a license would now be approved, although he expected the government to appeal.

He said Malaysiakini, which attracts about 400,000 online readers a day and has sections in English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil, wanted to publish an English-language newspaper to reach the many Malaysians who still receive the news through print.

Ms. Masjaliza, from the Center for Independent Journalism, said it was difficult to predict whether the ruling would lead to a rush of applications for printing licenses, because printing a newspaper still requires a large amount of capital.

But many Malaysians, particularly those in rural areas, still rely on print, she said, and a new newspaper could challenge the dominance of the government-linked media in those areas.

“If a newspaper launched that is targeted toward the Malay hinterland,” she said, “it would have a huge impact in terms of the kind of information people get, which has more diversity of opinions, which has more space being given to multiple political actors and political parties.”

Amendments made this year to the Printing Presses and Publications Act allow a company whose application for a publishing license has been rejected to appeal to the courts for the decision to be reviewed. Previously, Ms. Masjaliza said, these companies had no legal recourse.

Publications are also no longer required to renew their licenses annually, but media freedom advocates argue that the government should go further and remove the requirement for publishing permits.