Google is at odds with Apple, Microsoft and Cisco over the licensing and litigation of patents. While Google wants to make the most of patents it will receive if its acquisition of Motorola is approved, the others want to change the way so-called essential patents are licensed.

The changes Samsung Electronics has made to the Galaxy Tab 10.1N are enough to no longer infringe on Apple's intellectual property rights, a judge at the district court in Düsseldorf, Germany, decided on Thursday.

Femtocell developer Airvana is charging Ericsson with breaching their contract over femtocell technology, in a lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York.

Rambus and Nvidia have settled past lawsuits and signed a patent agreement covering a broad range of integrated circuit products, Rambus said on Wednesday.

Google is planning to send a letter to standards setting organizations, stating that Motorola Mobility's standards-essential patents will continue to be available on FRAND terms after its acquisition of the company, a person close to the situation said late Tuesday.

Samsung took a step toward finding a kind of "pax tabletica" with arch-foe Apple in an Australian court last week, offering to remove features from its Galaxy Tab to avoid a court ban on sales of the device in that country. But what's really interesting about the case isn't the technical litigation, but the underlying attempt to define how much of a product's design is actually protected under existing, fragmented international laws.

Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.

Imagine a world in which Microsoft wasn't allowed to sell Windows or Word, no one could use a Blackberry, Intel's chips were taken off the market and every company that wanted to deploy Linux had to pay an exorbitant fee to an obscure software vendor.