• Red Hat joins battle against patent case at Supreme Court
• Red Hat: Making a Move, Up 2.6%
• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to Speak at Economy Forum

gigaom.com: When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia’s patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat’s next tangle with Acacia being kept secret?

pogson.6k.ca: We retain one XP machine here simply because it can play DVD videos. One can copy a DVD for personal use/backup so the encryption is not a matter of copyright but restriction on access and a means to extend copyright.

networkworld.com: The problem is that most of the people who are looking at the "line by line" example don't actually understand code. SCO did this, through the same legal team (Boies Schiller) with its claims that Linux had direct copied code from UnixWare.

blog.internetnews.com: Red Hat has settled an alleged patent infringement case with IP firm Acacia Research Corporation around U.S. Patent #6,163,776. That particular case was pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Civil Action No: 6:09-cv-00097-LED.

engadget.com: Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen has filed suit against nine companies over patent violations. Through his current firm, Interval Licensing LLC, Allen is suing Apple, Google, AOL, Facebook, ebay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube (which is a subsidiary of Google).

computerworld.com: Oracle has filed a lawsuit against Google, charging that its Android phone software infringes Oracle patents and copyrights related to Java, Oracle said on Thursday.

linuxjournal.com: In a country where the legal system is based on precedents, a judge's recent decision just may make the use of Linux a whole lot easier.

• Judge rules that circumventing DRM is not illegal
• EFF Wins New Legal Protections for Video Artists, Cell Phone Hackers

arstechnica.com: Sony did not make many friends in the tech community when the company forcibly removed the option to install Linux via a mandatory firmware update. The problem was simple: Sony had previously pushed this feature as an advantage its system held over its competitors, and later assured gamers that it would continue to be supported.

h-online.com: Just a few days before its own liquidation hearings, The SCO Group has lodged an appeal against the judgement that pulled the rug out from under the company's numerous ongoing legal battles.

• Here's Bilski: It's Affirmed, But . . .No Decision on Software Patentability
• First thoughts on Bilski
• Software Freedom Law Center Responds to Landmark Supreme Court Patent Decision
• US Supreme Court rejects Bilski patent but nothing else
• Bilski loses, but the patent madness continues

groklaw.net: Here you go, munchkins. Judge Ted Stewart has ruled for Novell and against SCO. Novell's claim for declaratory judgment is granted; SCO's claims for specific performance and breach of the implied covenant of good fair and fair dealings are denied.

everydaylht.com: In the last three years, Microsoft claims to have entered into over 600 licensing agreements with companies small and large over alleged patent violations in "Linux". One consistent feature of all these agreements is that their contents are unknown.

gofanboy.com: You shouldn't act surprised to find out that Sony is being sued yet again over its decision to remove Linux support from its PS3 game console. Attorney Rebecca Call was the first lawyer to smell blood and find a disgruntled PS3 owner who was willing to file suit and go along with a class action status.

marketwatch.com: Red Hat, Inc. announced that today a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, returned a verdict in favor of Red Hat, Inc. and Novell, Inc. in a case alleging patent infringement brought by IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation.

ps3.ign.com: A class action lawsuit has been filed against Sony Computer Entertainment America for the removal of the 'Other OS' feature from the PlayStation 3.

groklaw.net: SCO has filed its "renewed" motion for judgment "as a matter of law", with its supporting memorandum. They ask the judge to rule over the heads of the jury and decide that the jury "simply got it wrong" when it ruled that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 from Novell. In the alternative, they'd like a new trial.

eweekeurope.co.uk: A legal dispute between Microsoft and an open source company in Argentina raises questions about the availability of desktop Linux in other countries, experts claim

FAside from a few vested interests in the entertainment industry, nearly everyone hates the system we’ve got — it’s clearly overreaching and ill-adapted to the electronic world of the internet. But what sort of system would we like?