lawsuit

Motorola now has only one patent left to stand on in its ongoing infringement case with Apple.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Posner ruled in Apple's favor yesterday by dismissing Motorola's U.S. Patent No. 6,175,559.

Described in tech terms as a "method for generating preamble sequences in a code division multiple access system," the patent was seen by Motorola as essential to the company's 3G (UMTS) standard, according to Foss Patents' Florian Mueller.

But Apple had argued otherwise, and Posner agreed that the patent should be thrown out. The removal doesn'… Read more

Facebook has been served with another lawsuit related to its IPO by investors who claim the company's executives and its bankers misled them by "selectively disclosing" material information about its revenue outlook.

The lawsuit (see below), which was filed Friday in U.S. District Court for Southern New York, is based on reports that, in the days before the public offering, the lead underwriter for the deal told major clients it was reducing its revenue forecast for the company. The underwriters of the deal -- Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs -- reportedly reduced their estimates … Read more

Oracle has filed a legal complaint against Lodsys -- the company that's taken aim at app makers on Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and other technology platforms for infringing on its patents -- with the hopes of invalidating them.

The enterprise software giant filed a suit against the Texas-based patent holder in a U.S. District Court in Wisconsin last week (via GigaOm), saying the firm has "repeatedly threatened numerous Oracle customers," and that the company isn't actually using any of the technology for anything besides getting revenue from other companies.

"Lodsys did not … Read more

Top executives at Facebook and Yahoo are in advanced talks to settle their patent fight, and an agreement could be announced in the next couple of weeks, sources tell All Things D.

Terms of the settlement, meant to resolve the patent infringement lawsuits each has filed against the other, could include cross-licensing of patents between the one-time partners and deeper integration of their respective tools, according to the report.

Yahoo declined to comment. CNET has contacted Facebook for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

Yahoo fired the first salvo in the battle in March when it … Read more

It's not quite time to pop those champagne corks yet, but things for Facebook have taken a slight turn for the better as trading closed today.

The social network's stock was up by 5 percent after four straight days of losses, according to Reuters. Yesterday the market closed with Facebook's stock at $28.19, but today it rose by $1.41 to close at $29.60.

This is still a far cry from the initial starting price of $38 per share when the company started trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market two weeks ago.

Three consumer rights groups filed a friend of the court brief today arguing that allowing the government access to an individual's Twitter account information would chill free speech.

The brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Citizen comes three weeks after Twitter filed its own challenge to an order from a New York State court requiring it to hand over data on one of its users who was arrested for disorderly conduct during an Occupy Wall Street protest last year.

The District Attorney's Office in New York wants Twitter to turn … Read more

Venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is refuting claims of gender discrimination brought by a female junior partner after it hired an investigator to look into the matter, the company's veteran partner John Doerr said in a statement released today.

"We have taken great care to treat this situation seriously, swiftly, and with integrity," Doerr said in his statement. "We hired an expert, independent investigator to conduct a thorough inquiry. The investigator's report concluded that the allegations are without merit and that our firm does not discriminate on the basis of gender. In the … Read more

NEW YORK -- A group of television broadcasters this morning tried to show a federal court that Aereo, the fledgling Internet-video service, is much more like Netflix and Hulu than an antenna-rental service -- and that it therefore has to pay to use their programs.

Aereo maintains that the company's business model immunizes it from paying for programming the way Netflix does. The broadcasters say this is nonsense, and this morning asked the District Court for the Southern District of New York for a preliminary injunction that would require Aereo to cease operations.

To grant that, the court must … Read more

Reversing the trend of recent court upsets for the Web giant, Google had a notable success in French Court today. Siding with Google in its battle against French broadcaster TF1, the court ruled that the Internet company is not liable for filtering out pirated content on YouTube, according to Reuters.

The French media company brought the case against Google alleging that copyrighted sports and movies were easily accessible on YouTube, according to Reuters.

In this case, TF1 sought more than $176 million (141 million euros) in damages, but the French court ended up ordering the broadcaster to instead pay Google'… Read more