intellectual property

Apple and Research In Motion can now intervene in Kodak's efforts to reinstate its patent case against the two tech giants, which was tossed by the U.S. International Trade Commission earlier this year.

In a court order (pdf) posted last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., said both Apple and RIM could intervene in the case, in which Kodak accused the two companies of infringing on its patents.

The decision means both companies can participate in Kodak's appeal and defend the products accused of infringement.

Kodak originally filed … Read more

Apple has eked out yet another legal victory against its Android competition.

After a five-week delay, a regional court in Munich, Germany, ruled that Apple can file for an injunction against Motorola phones and tablets following claims of patent infringement, according to Foss Patents' Florian Mueller. The patent in question deals with the so-called "rubber-banding" feature, an effect that causes a page on a mobile device to bounce back up after a user has swiped to the bottom of the screen.

Describing the technology in both a European patent and U.S. patent, Apple had accused Motorola of … Read more

Oracle is due to receive a hefty amount in legal damages from SAP, but the database giant wants more.

In early August, SAP agreed to pay Oracle $306 million following a trial that found SAP guilty of copyright infringement. The jury verdict reached in 2010 determined that Oracle should receive $1.3 billion in damages.

But last September, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton deemed that amount excessive and gave Oracle a choice of accepting $272 million in damages or requesting a new trial.

The amount ballooned to the$306 million agreed upon last month. At the time, Oracle general … Read more

A new compression technology represents a significant improvement over today's standard, a new study found. The result could help pave the way for video with at least four times the pixels of today's 1080p standard.

The new compression technology, called HEVC or H.265, is significantly better than today's prevailing standard video codec, called AVC or H.264, researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, concluded.

"The test results clearly exhibited a substantial improvement in compression performance, as compared to AVC," the researchers said. "As ultra-high definition television has recently … Read more

Apple shares are up about $14, or two percent, following the company's legal win against Samsung last Friday.

On Friday, a jury found that Samsung had infringed on several mobile device patents owned by the iPhone maker, awarding Apple more than $1 billion in damages.

This morning's jump pushed Apple's stock to a new intraday high around $676 per share. On the flip side, the stock of Android OS maker Google dipped about 1.3 percent in morning trading to around $669.

Apple's iPhone 5 will likely be another beneficiary of the legal victory, some analysts … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A decision in the multi-billion dollar trial between Apple and Samsung has been reached, and will be announced shortly.

Join our live blog as the verdict is read.

Hanging in the balance are possible sales bans on phones and tablets on both sides, as well as a damages tally that ranges from millions to billions of dollars depending on how the jury comes down.

The nine-person group heard the closing arguments from both sides on Tuesday. Apple used its time to once again paint Samsung as a copycat that threatened to undo innovation, while Samsung depicted … Read more

A federal court in Massachusetts today upheld a $675,000 damages award against Joel Tenenbaum, who was accused of illegally downloading 31 songs from a file-sharing Web site and distributing them and was sued by the main recording companies in the U.S.

U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel rejected Tenenbaum's request for a new jury trial, saying jurors had appropriately considered the evidence of Tenenbaum's actions -- downloading and distributing files for two years despite warnings -- and the harm to the plaintiffs. The penalty is at the low end of the range for willful … Read more

ASPEN, Colo. -- It hasn't been an especially felicitous year for the founder of file-sharing site MegaUpload: his domain name has been seized, his assets have been impounded, and Kim Dotcom faces potential extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges of copyright infringement.

That's a fate that RapidShare is determined to avoid. The Swiss company says it wants to be a legitimate hosting service that not only responds promptly to removal requests from copyright holders, but that goes far beyond what the law requires.

RapidShare's "responsible practices" policy may have pleased Hollywood when it … Read more

A trade show in September will be the coming-out party for video technology called HEVC or H.265, a new arrival in a hotly contested market for the best approach to compression.

HEVC, short for High Efficiency Video Coding, is for encoding and decoding video streams so they can be stored or transmitted more economically than today's dominant H.264, aka AVC or Advanced Video Coding. Specifically, HEVC allies say it can deliver the same quality video as H.264 with half the network bandwidth.

The codec has been in the making for years, but it's now almost … Read more