Joel Rosenblatt

The trial set for July involved cases related to a ruling in 2013 that company had orchestrated an illegal scheme with publishers to raise e-book prices. A federal judge in Manhattan ordered Apple and its adversaries to submit a filing seeking approval of their accord within one month.

Details of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

The US government sued Apple and five of the biggest publishers in April 2012, claiming the maker of the iPad pushed them to sign agreements letting it sell digital copies of their books under a pricing model that made most e-books more expensive. Under the contracts, the publishers set book prices, with Apple getting 30 percent.

Apple and the publishers used the contracts to force Amazon.com, the No. 1 e-book seller, to change its pricing model, the government claimed. At the time, Amazon was selling electronic versions of best-selling books for $9.99, which was often below cost.

US District Judge Denise Cote ruled against Apple after a non-jury trial. Steve Berman, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said that all the US attorneys general and consumers settled the case. Berman said he filed a memorandum of understanding with the court under seal, which prevents him from describing the agreement.

Judge Lucy Koh’s fingerprints are on your Gmail account, your smartphone, and, if you’re a Silicon Valley engineer, possibly your prospects for changing jobs.

Judge Koh, the California federal judge overseeing the three-year patent battle between Apple and Samsung Electronics, has so far thwarted the iPhone maker’s bid to keep Galaxy phones off the market. Now, after a jury found that both companies infringed patents, the firms are poised to take new runs at persuading Koh to order sales bans on the other.

Judge Koh also has made a mark presiding over privacy suits against Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo! In March, she blasted Google’s privacy policy as vague and possibly misleading. Not long after, Google changed its terms.

Google won a major victory in its fight against claims it illegally scanned private e-mail messages to and from Gmail accounts, defeating a bid to unify lawsuits in a single group case on behalf of hundreds of millions of Internet users.

US District Judge Lucy Koh refused to let the case proceed as a class action, which would have allowed plaintiffs to pool resources and put greater pressure on Google to settle. If individuals pursue their claims against the owner of world’s largest search engine, they’ll need to use their own financial resources to litigate. Judge Koh found that the proposed classes of people in the Google case aren’t “sufficiently cohesive,” according to the ruling.

Google is seeking to black out portions of a transcript from a public court hearing that includes information on how it mines data from personal e-mails.

Google, fighting a lawsuit claiming its interception of e-mails amounts to illegal wiretapping, asked US District Judge Lucy Koh in a filing to redact “confidential” information from the transcript, without being more specific.

The main revelation at the Feb 27 hearing was the existence of “Content Onebox,” used by Google to intercept e-mails for targeted advertising and to build user profiles, Sean Rommel, a lawyer for plaintiffs, told the judge at the time. The hearing in federal court in San Jose (CA) was to determine whether the lawsuit will proceed as a group suit, or class action.