Research In Motion (RIM) managed to escape from having to pay a hefty patent infringement fine when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California overturned an earlier verdict that would have had the company pay $147.2 million in damages to Mformation, a software company that deals with mobile device management. According to the presiding judge, there wasn't enough evidence to support the jury's findings of patent infringement.
Don't feed the trolls; the axiom may work well for avoiding Godwin's Law in forum postings, but it isn't working so well in courtrooms around the globe. In fact, a new study from the Boston University School of Law says patent trolls -- companies that deal solely in IP litigation rather than actual services and products -- are fatter and hungrier than ever before, costing the economy a whopping $29 billion in 2011. To put things in perspective, trolling "only" cost the economy roughly $6.7 billion in 2005.
Software patents, to put it mildly, are a bit of a mess. Its difficult for us to say that innovation which happens in bits, rather than hardware shouldn’t be protected, but naturally a line must be drawn if progress is to be made. On Friday US federal Judge Richard Posner 
It's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when you're Apple, a company that thrives on form just as much as it does on function, there's nothing flattering about other companies designing products that look even remotely like existing iDevices. And make no mistake, today's Ultrabooks share design DNA with Apple's MacBook Air, DNA Apple doesn't want anyone else using, so the Cupertino company went out and snagged a broad patent for the MBA's wedge shaped design.
Google and Oracle sat down for a last-ditch, court-ordered settlement conference over the weekend, but their latest attempt at settling their longstanding patent dispute failed to yield any results even after six hours of parleying. With the latest settlement conference between the two companies proving just as sleeveless as those before it, their protracted patent dispute is now all set to go to trial.
If you own a cellphone, there's a good chance you've encountered phantom vibrations; you know, when you could've sworn you felt your phone vibrating in your pocket when it really wasn't. Nokia's poised to either eliminate phantom vibrations completely or take them to new (and possibly somewhat creepy) heights with a new patent application for haptic tattoos that vibrate when your phone rings.
When it rains, it pours, and as if Kodak didn't have enough to worry about already as it ditches the camera business and tries to figure out how to pay back movie studios millions of dollars it owes in unpaid rebates, all while 
While Microsoft is all about its Windows Phone platform, Google's Android OS is proving a profitable nugget for the Redmond software giant. What some people don't know is that Microsoft collects license fees from several manufacturers who use Android in their products, and in exchange Microsoft agrees not to sue them for infringing on its IP. LG is the newest company to ink an Android license agreement with Microsoft, whose patent portfolio now covers nearly three quarters of all Android smartphones sold in the U.S.
It looks as though Google decided to treat itself to a holiday bonus by splurging on over 200 patents belonging to IBM. The latest round of patents run the gamut from wireless phone technologies to JavaScript widgets, as well as one that could be used to bolster its social networking service, Google+. This particular patent -- U.S. Patent 7,865,592 -- describes "Using semantic networks to develop a social network."
TiVo is on a roll. Following a $500 million settlement with satellite TV company Dish Network and its set-top box provider, EchoStar, back in May 2011, TiVo just put the squeeze on cable TV operator AT&T, which is on the hook for at least $215 million through June 2018 to settle a patent lawsuit related to digital video recorder (DVR) technologies.
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