Microsoft has been slapped with a lawsuit filed by Korean instant messaging program developer Digito.com, which is claiming millions of dollars in anti-trust damages.

In response to the controversy surrounding software patents, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has tightened up considerably on granting them, and they are now harder to get than any other type of patent (except for business methods). That’s the view of Mark A.

You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.

Every once and a while some patent scare comes up in the Linux world, often from Microsoft. They all generally go like this: big company says vague thing about their patent and Linux; everyone freaks out. These sorts of issues generally divide technical Linux users into two groups.

Northeastern University and a start-up company cofounded by an associate professor have filed a patent-infringement suit against Google Inc., claiming that database technology patented in 1997 was misappropriated by the world's most popular Internet search service.

Novell has boosted its legal team with one of America's top patent lawyers in what is building up to be a legal battle with Microsoft.

At the Linux Foundation's annual LinuxCon event this week, Columbia University law professor and Software Freedom Law Center founder Eben Moglen explained that prospects for software patent reform are bleak and that the time has come for the free software community to start finding ways to solve its patent problems by using the patent system itself.

MontaVista has bought out its partners to take full ownership of a Seoul-based embedded Linux venture. MontaVista Software Korea will continue to help MontaVista support Samsung, LG Electronics, ETRI, and other Korean customers using MontaVista's embedded Linux distribution and development tools, MontaVista said.

A company that was just awarded more than $140 million from Microsoft in a patent-infringement suit has sued the software giant again, this time for alleged infringements in Windows Vista and Office 2007.