SimpleAir in Texas said Thursday it had settled its patent infringement litigation against Apple, and entered into a confidential license agreement by which Apple had taken a license to its patents.

Chinese communications equipment company Huawei Technologies has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against patent company InterDigital, claiming it is abusing its patents allegedly essential to the 3G (UMTS) standard, it said Thursday.

During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.

Google-owned Motorola Mobility has infringed a Microsoft patent related to SMS messaging, according to a ruling in the Munich regional court, which also dismissed a second case related to a localization patent.

Most of the jurors in the Oracle v Google trial thought Google's use of 37 Java APIs in Android should be allowed under the doctrine of fair use, one of the jurors revealed Wednesday after the trial had ended.

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.