January 2, 2013 - Apple added the Galaxy S III Mini to its patent litigation against Samsung in November, but withdrew the Mini from the lawsuit after Samsung stated that it is not "making, selling, offering to sell or importing the Galaxy S III Mini in the United States."
Samsung sells the Mini in Europe, where it competes with Apple's iPhone 5.
December 19, 2012 - Samsung announced that it will drop its lawsuits against Apple in Europe, where it had been attempting to block sales of Apple devices. Samsung had been facing an antitrust probe from European regulators.
December 18, 2012 - U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh denied Apple's request for an injunction on Samsung smartphones, in part because such a ban would be harmful to the public interest and also because the devices contain much more than the infringing features.
December 17, 2012 - A federal jury in Delaware found that Apple's iPhone infringes three patents belonging to MobileMedia Ideas, a non-practicing entity owned jointly by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA.
The lawsuit originally included fourteen patents, but the case only went to trial over three. The jury found that those three patents are infringed by the iPhone's camera and methods of call handling and call rejection.
December 10, 2012 - A lawsuit between LendingTree LLC and QuinStreet Inc. has been resolved.
LendingTree brought the lawsuit against QuinStreet in September 2010 for infringement of a patent on coordinating loans over the Internet. Under the terms of the settlement, QuinStreet agreed not to challenge the LendingTree patent's validity and licensed the patent.
December 3, 2012 - A federal district judge in Seattle ruled that Motorola is not entitled to an injunction on Microsoft products that infringe certain of its standards-essential patents on the H.264 advanced video coding standard and the 802.11 wireless LAN standard.
November 26, 2012 - Innovention Toys LLC, a company headed by a Colorado professor named Michael Larson, won its patent infringement lawsuit against MGA, Wal-Mart Stores and Toys "R" Us. A federal jury in New Orleans found that the defendants had infringed Innovention's patent on a strategy board game using lasers and mirrors.
November 26, 2012 - A federal jury in California found that Best Buy Co. misappropriated trade secrets from TechForward Inc. and violated a confidentiality agreement between the two companies. The jury ordered Best Buy to pay $22 million to TechForward for unjust enrichment.
November 19, 2012 - A company called Innovative Automation sued Apple for patent infringement, claiming that the iCloud product and service infringe two of their patents.
Both of the allegedly infringed patents are titled "Method and System for Supplying Products from Pre-Stored Digital Data in Response to Demands Transmitted via Computer Network."
November 13, 2012 - Last December, we wrote a blog post about the lawsuit between Wealthcare Capital Management and UBS Financial Services over patented financial planning processes. PIEtech, the maker of the MoneyGuidePro software that UBS was using and which Wealthcare claimed infringed its patents, also joined the lawsuit at the end of last year in order to help defend its client, UBS.