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For AMD, the 2001 Intel agreement allows it to manufacture chips using Intel's X86 design and rely on chip foundries for up to 20 percent of their total manufacturing capacity. Intel, meanwhile, receives royalties from AMD, under the deal. The companies, despite their heated legal battles over antitrust matters, have had a long-standing patent and licensing relationship, going back to 1976. But this latest turn of events could result in a change in that relationship. AMD, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, said Intel sent it a letter that alleges AMD: Committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the company's Global Foundries joint venture and purports to terminate the company's rights and licenses under the cross license in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

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There you go, folks. Reductio ad absurdum: a company is a machine, or at least analogous to one, kinda sorta like one. Therefore any process or method they come up with to do business would be patentable, presumably, in that universe. Well. Could someone please patent what Wall Street just did to the economy, and then refuse to license the "invention", so as to prevent those dudes from ever doing it again? Or just patent flaming greed, will you, somebody? Do the rest of us a favor and get it off the table or at least constrained.

The court rejected that claim about a company being analogous to a machine, but Justice Pauline Newman, while agreeing with the majority, nevertheless argued that it's good for the economy to have business methods patents, so we shouldn't go too far in limiting them. *Too far*?!

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It was already known that Nintendo was on the hook for $21 million in a patent suit over the company's controllers. A Texas judge last week denied the game maker's request for a new trial, and Bloomberg is reporting that the judge will issue a ban to halt sales of the controllers tomorrow.

However, if the ban were to be issued, it would not take effect until after a Nintendo appeal on the original ruling was resolved. Nintendo could also avoid the ban by posting a bond or putting royalties into an escrow account, according to Bloomberg.

The original suit sought to have Nintendo's Wii Classic Controller, Wii Nunchuk, GameCube controller, and GameCube WaveBird all deemed in violation of an Anascape patent for a "six degrees of freedom" interface device. A jury found that all of those products, with the exception of the Wii Nunchuk, infringed on Anascape's patent.

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As part of VeriSign’s (VRSN) 2001 purchase of eNic Corporation (operator of the .CC registry) the company became the owner of a patent application, which has now been granted on March 4th of this year under patent number 7,337,910 b2. While the original patent application, at the time written by eNic’s CEO Brian Cartmell and eNic’s CTO Jothan Frakes, was used in order to resolve and offer non-existent domain names for registration, it would also cover Verisign’s Sitefinder application, implemented in September of 2003, causing any unregistered .COM/.NET domain to resolve to a parked page. VeriSign, was ordered by ICANN to cease the practice shortly after they introduced it.

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A federal judge today issued an injunction that would bar Internet phone company Vonage from signing up additional customers as punishment for infringing on patents held by Verizon Communications.

Vonage, of Holmdel, planned an immediate appeal.

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The EPLA is "anchronistic", and is even disliked by some large companies such as Nokia and GlaxoSmithKline, according to Austrian Green MEP Eva Lichtenberger. Others said the measure would effectively take the software patent issue out of the reach of the EU's democratic controls. "We are all for improvements to the European patent system, but we must continue the search for solutions within the framework of the EU," said Maria Berger, the PES' spokeswoman for legal affairs, and former French prime minister Michel Rocard, in a statement.

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To protect this franchise, increasingly under attack from rivals, H-P could sue any ink makers it suspects are infringing on its patents. This month, it sued China's G&G Ninestar Image Co., a cartridge manufacturer, alleging G&G had violated seven H-P patents in cartridge design. The complaint also targets four online retailers. H-P also asked the International Trade Commission to open an investigation against Ninestar. A Ninestar spokeswoman said the company had no comment. This latest suit follows other actions over the past year. In June, H-P said retailers Walgreen Co. and OfficeMax Inc. had infringed on H-P ink patents with ink used at in-store ink-cartridge-refilling stations; Walgreen and OfficeMax both deny the claims. Last year, H-P similarly warned the U.S. arm of Cartridge World Inc., a domestic retail ink-cartridge refiller; Cartridge World says it is working to resolve the issue.

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They argue that by effectively reducing the potential gains, people and companies may not have such a great incentive to obtain their livelihood by sitting on patents until they can find a company to sue for infringement. Misener also called on politicians to outlaw the practice of awarding compensation for estimated lost profits to patent holders who don't offer a product that competes directly with the company they're accusing of infringement. Those who "do not compete in (the) marketplace are not entitled to lost profits but instead to a reasonable royalty," he said.

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SA Video Technology Corp., a small technology firm that holds patents for the digital delivery of media, said on Thursday it has filed a suit against top U.S. cable operators over their video-on-demand services. The Old Lyme, Conneticut-based company said it sued Time Warner Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., alleging the cable operators violated its patent with their video-on-demand services offered to subscribers.