Copyright troll Rightraven has been ordered by a judge in Nevada to forfeit all of its intellectual property in order to pay its debts, Wired reported. The company was established in 2010 with the goal of suing blogs that republish sections of newspaper articles without permission. Rightraven saw early success and secured a number of small settlements for its clients, but it never won a case that was brought to trial, instead amassing debts amounting to approximately $200,000 owed to various defendants. The ...

Lemko Corporation, a private software and systems developer, on Wednesday filed a complaint against Motorola Mobility alleging that it stole trade secrets and is financially benefiting from the misappropriation of Lemko’s source code. The company claims that Motorola hired an engineer who developed unique, protected code while employed by Lemko, and proceeded to implement the source code on Motorola’s servers without licensing the technology. The code in question relates to server side network-ba...

Apple and Samsung are among the companies expected to take part in an upcoming sealed-bid auction of RPO’s manufacturing assets and patent portfolio, which covers technology surrounding the company’s Digital Waveguide Touch (DWT) solution. California-based RPO Inc. filed for bankruptcy in April of this year, and an auction to liquidate its protected manufacturing processes and IP portfolio will take place on November 3rd. The company’s DWT technology, which is touted as a superior touch solu...

Microsoft’s alleged strategy of forcing Android partners into intellectual property licensing deals with threats of legal action is once again under fire. In a report released on Friday, intellectual property management firm M-CAM offered a no-holds-barred analysis of Microsoft’s “license or we sue” strategy. The firm said Microsoft is offsetting its own failures in the mobile space by forcing more successful companies to pay royalties on Android device sales, and it likened Microsoft&...

A Samsung executive has gone on record in stating that the South Korea-based electronics giant plans to take a more active role in combating Apple in the companies’ ongoing war. “We’ll be pursuing our rights for this in a more aggressive way from now on,” Lee Younghee, head of global marketing for mobile communications, told the Associated Press in an interview on Friday. Lee stated that Apple has been “free riding” on Samsung’s wireless patents and the company will f...

Back in July — less than a week after Google’s general counsel Kevin Walker took to the company’s blog to launch a war of words against rivals and their patent trolling — Google bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM’s portfolio. This past Tuesday, the U.S. Patent Office published records showing that the tech giant has purchased another 1,023 patents from IBM, this time covering technologies that range from “COMMUNICATIONS ON A NETWORK” to “SELF-ALIGNED DOUBLE-GATE MO...

Dutch technology news site Webwereld on Friday uncovered new images that suggest Apple may again be tampering with photographic evidence used in its case against Samsung. In this instance, it appears as though an image submitted to a court in the Netherlands intentionally misrepresents the South Korea-based company’s Galaxy S II smartphone. While the Galaxy S II is both wider and taller than Apple’s iPhone 3GS, the image Apple submitted as evidence shows a device that is exactly the same height as...

It’s only Tuesday, but the big news this week is already behind us: Google intends to shell out $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility and its portfolio of roughly 25,000 patents. The deal was covered far and wide, but some of the most interesting thoughts surrounding the news came late Monday night from Apple pundit John Gruber. The initial intent of Gruber’s piece was to point out the irony of reporter Dan Lyons’ repeated use of baseless speculation in an effort to discredit “A...

In a post penned by Larry Page on Google’s company blog, the CEO explains why Google decided to shell out $12.5 billion to purchase smartphone vendor Motorola Mobility. While Page had plenty to say about Motorola’s extensive history and its leading role in Android’s explosive growth, he also points to what many believe to be one of the leading factors behind the deal: patents. “We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive p...

German news outlet Financial Informer reported on Tuesday that Apple has won a preliminary injunction to stop the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the whole of the European Union except for the Netherlands. The Regional Court of Düsseldorf appears to have sided with Apple’s claims that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringes on intellectual property related to the design of Apple’s iPad. Apple has a similar ongoing lawsuit in the Netherlands. Should Samsung continue to sell the tablet, th...

Microsoft’s Communications boss Frank X. Shaw on Thursday responded to an update posted by Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, which was written in response to Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith’s response to Drummond’s initial claim that Microsoft and Apple were playing dirty with patents. Catch all that? Here’s the gist of it: Google’s David Drummond wrote on Wednesday that Microsoft, Apple and others were “banding together to acquire Novell’s old p...

Thanks to royalty payments from awards related to patent complaints against HTC, Microsoft is estimated to have made three times more revenue from sales of HTC’s Android phones than it did from sales of Windows Phone licenses last quarter. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu estimated this past May that Microsoft had made five times more money from HTC’s Android phones than its own Windows Phone platform through the first quarter of this year. In the second quarter, Dediu says Microsoft made approximatel...

Apple sat quiet following Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond’s rant yesterday, as it always does, but Microsoft was not content letting Drummond air his grievances without responding. Drummond on Wednesday penned a post on Google’s blog claiming that Apple, Microsoft and other companies are joining together to “strangle” Android with patent complaints. With all of the patent-related lawsuits against Android partners right now, this certainly seems like a valid complaint. High...

Samsung announced on Tuesday that it has purchased Grandis, a maker of spin transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM). Grandis will be wrapped inside Samsung’s existing research and development branch where it will continue to work on memory semiconductor technology. According to its website, Grandis “holds a unique, broad patent portfolio in STT-RAM, including key fundamental and practical implementation patents, and licenses its IP to technology companies that design, develop and manufactur...