Joe Mullin

Sprint has been filing patent lawsuits over VoIP for more than a decade now, and the company may have just scored its biggest payout yet. On March 3, a jury in Sprint's home district of Kansas City (MO) said that Time Warner Cable, now part of Charter Communications, must pay $139.8 million for infringing several patents related to VoIP technology. The jury found that TWC's infringement was willful, which means that the judge could increase the damage award up to three times its value. “We are disappointed with the outcome and are considering our options,” a Charter spokesperson said. A Sprint spokesperson said the company was pleased with the verdict, which represented its "full damage demand."

President Obama weighed in on the matter of pardoning National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on Nov 18. During his European tour, he was interviewed by Der Spiegel—the largest newspaper in Germany, a country where Snowden is particularly popular. After discussing a wide range of issues, he was asked: Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?President Obama replied: "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point."

He continued, "I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system. At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then I think those issues come into play. Until that time, what I've tried to suggest -- both to the American people, but also to the world -- is that we do have to balance this issue of privacy and security."

Google has ended its legal conflict with a Mississippi state official who opened a wide-ranging investigation into the search giant's business practices. A dismissal agreement filed in court states that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Google will "endeavor to collaborate in addressing the harmful consequences of unlawful and/or dangerous online content."

The document also states that Hood's office withdrew the original subpoena on April 22 and acknowledges that Google "remains subject to the laws of the State of Mississippi and to the jurisdiction and authority of the Attorney General." The agreement comes after the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled against Google, finding that the search company's challenge to Hood's investigation was premature. However, the appeals court opinion also criticized Hood's demands for evidence as being overly broad, noting that Google tried hard to comply.

After Aereo lost its case at the Supreme Court, it quickly shut down. But FilmOn, just kept on going. Now that decision is coming back to bite FilmOn and its eccentric owner, Alki David.

FilmOn and David were slapped with a $90,000 contempt order -- $10,000 for each day that it kept distributing network TV channels. US District Judge Naomi Buchwald found FilmOn in violation of its injunction not to infringe TV companies' copyrights "by any means." David, who plans to appeal the judge's order, is not too happy about the decision. Judge Buchwald "largely relied on unauthenticated and inadmissible news articles" to find him in contempt, David said.

Several of Germany's largest newspaper and magazine publishers have instituted legal proceedings against Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

They're seeking an order that would make the search engines pay them an 11 percent portion of their "gross sales, including foreign sales” that come “directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public." That's according to new media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who published a blog post calling the demands "as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous" and part of a German "war on the link."

The move appears to be an attempt to achieve in courts what the publishers were not able to get through the German legislative process in 2013.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end. EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago.

They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.

Things weren't the same, though. The lawsuit has changed dramatically, due in part to the Snowden leaks about government surveillance, which began to appear in newspapers in June 2013. And the scope of the case has narrowed. That's partly because the EFF has focused its demands on what it believes are the most important documents: several still-secret FISC opinions, as well as one memo from the White House's Office of Legal Counsel, comprising some 52 pages.

It's also narrowed because the Department of Justice has released some of the documents that were asked for. The most striking revelation from those documents was that some FISC judges sharply criticized the National Security Agency's record of compliance with rules the court had set out for handling its giant database of phone calls and other data.

The US Supreme Court issued rulings in two of the five patent cases it heard this term. In both cases, the high court unanimously struck down rules created by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court.

The two rulings continue a pattern that has developed over the past several years, in which the Supreme Court has overturned key Federal Circuit rulings, finding them too favorable to patent-holders and too harsh on parties accused of infringement. All four of the companies involved in the legal opinion are competitors with real products -- none represent the much-debated "patent trolls," that is, companies with no business beyond patent lawsuits. Yet, the issue of patent trolls looms large in the background of these opinions.

Both decisions will make life easier for Internet and other tech companies frequently accused of infringement.

In the case of Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies, trolls were happy to use the Federal Circuit-approved theory about "induced infringement" to sue tech companies. They argued that even when a defendant didn't complete all steps of a patent itself, it encouraged its customers to do so. In the case of Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments, the Supreme Court has made it easier to throw out patents on the grounds that they're "indefinite." The ruling widens another path of attack that can be used against vague patents.