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.

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.

Google's Android operating system does not infringe Oracle's Java patents, a jury in San Francisco found Wednesday in a setback for Oracle.

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.