June 6, 2011 - The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Stanford University's attempt to revive its lawsuit against Roche Holding.

The litigation centered on who owned patents developed by a Stanford researcher - Mark Holodniy - who had signed agreements with both Stanford and a company called Cetus that was later acquired by Roche. Stanford had sought to invalidate Holodniy's patent agreement with Cetus/Roche.

June 2, 2011 - Patent holder Lodsys, LLC filed suit against seven developers who create apps for Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

June 1, 2011 - Regular readers of our Wealth of Ideas newsletter may recall that in our January 2011 feature article, we predicted that Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB would be one of the big cases to watch this year. On May 31, the U.S.

May 20, 2011 - Eolas Technologies Inc. has settled with JPMorgan Chase & Co., which was a defendant in Eolas Technologies Inc. v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al. The lawsuit is still pending against several other defendants in a wide array of industries, including Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Frito-Lay, Adobe, J.C. Penney, PepsiCo, YouTube and others.

May 16, 2011 - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled that Rambus Inc. was wrong to shred documents related to its lawsuits against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor, and sent the cases back to the lower courts that originally heard them.

The ruling was based on evidence (from another of Rambus' patent lawsuits) that Rambus held "shred days" - complete with "pizza, beer, champagne, etc." - as part of its preparation for patent infringement litigation.

May 13, 2011 - A judge at the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Eastman Kodak does not infringe two of Apple Inc.'s patents on certain aspects of image-processing in digital cameras and mobile devices.

Apple filed this lawsuit as a countersuit after Eastman Kodak sued them and Research in Motion (RIM) for infringement of its image-preview patent. The ITC overruled that complaint in January 2011.

Apple and Eastman Kodak are still involved in two other lawsuits in a federal district court in Rochester, N.Y.

May 6, 2011 - Rosetta Stone Inc., which develops language-learning software, said in a statement that it has settled 77 cases against counterfeiters.

The defendants were in 73 cities and 27 states, and were found to infringe Rosetta's copyrights and trademarks through copying, downloading, sharing or selling pirated versions of Rosetta Stone software.

May 4, 2011 - When we last reported on this lawsuit on October 17, 2010, the U.S. Patent Office had affirmed TiVo's patent on its "Time Warp" technology (a DVR system that allows the user to record one program while watching another).