An appeals court on Friday rejected Microsoft Corp.'s challenge to a $142 million trial loss over patents on a way to prevent software piracy. "Substantial evidence supports the jury's verdict" that Microsoft infringed two valid patents owned by closely held z4 Technologies Inc., the appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled.

Those were the words of Microsoft counsel Tom Burt, regarding the upholding of a previous ruling overturning the $1.5B Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft patent infringement judgment.

Microsoft Corp. was sued by Dutch navigation-device maker TomTom NV, which claims the world’s largest software maker infringes four of its patents used for automobile navigation.
The suit comes less than a month after Microsoft filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington seeking to block some of TomTom’s U.S. imports.

Chris Brown's first report of the day is in, filed by phone during an extended break in the court session. The jury got to hear today about Judge Dale Kimball's earlier court rulings. We have all the important rulings in a new, special section on Groklaw's Novell Timeline page, so you can follow along.

The business software distributor is considering its options in light of a judge's ruling denying its ownership claims on the Unix operating system.

A judge has ruled that SCO doesn’t own the Unix copyright. — SCO’s claim to which was at the crux of its threats against Linux. What does this ruling mean to Microsoft, if anything?

Novell has filed a Notice of Filing of Offer of Proof Regarding Prior Inconsistent Declaration of Steven Sabbath. It is making a record that SCO was allowed to present testimony in direct examination that Novell knew was contradicted by deposition testimony, but then Novell couldn't tell the jury about it, because of rulings by the judge.

Continuing our series on the In Re Bilski ruling [PDF], here is Judge Mayer's dissenting opinion as text, the one that points out how utterly damaging all business methods patents are. Also, a reader sent me this link to what I agree is the best overview of the ruling that we've seen yet, by the law firm of Ladas & Parry.

Part of what Groklaw is doing is making an historical record of the SCO litigation. Since the August 10th ruling by Judge Dale Kimball that found that Novell did not transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights to Santa Cruz Operation in the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement, there has been a flurry of media coverage.