Read the rest of this post on the original site

On Friday, Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court ruled that Motorola failed to prove conclusively that Apple had infringed its European Patent 1053613, which covers a “method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal.” Motorola had argued that the invention described by that ridiculous mountain range of a phrase was essential to 3G/UTMS wireless telecommunications and that Apple had de facto infringed on it by producing 3G phones. But the technology in question has not been declared essential by any standards organization, only by Motorola itself, which was unable to convince Voss that Apple products actually used it.

“[Motorola Mobility] argued that any implementation of 3G/UMTS must inevitably infringe this patent claim, as opposed to demonstrating that the accused Apple products actually practice the claimed invention,” Florian Mueller explains over at FOSS Patents. “… [But it] didn’t show any kind of actual implementation (neither hardware nor software), and arguing merely on the basis of the specifications of the standard was insufficient to win.”

So, a significant win for Apple, which has lost to Motorola twice now in the same court. That said, as Motorola itself has observed “it only takes one bullet to kill,” and there are many more battles to fight in this seemingly interminable IP war.

Last year, the judge offered Oracle a choice: Accept a judgment of $272 million in damages, reduced from $1.3 billion awarded at trial, or seek a new trial. Oracle says in court filings that it wants a new trial.

The key passage of the two-page court filing reads as follows (the word “remittitur” refers to the judge’s previous order reducing the award):

Oracle has no choice but to elect a new trial, as accepting the remittitur would force Oracle to risk waiving its right to appeal the Court’s decision on the motions for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial. Oracle’s objective is to obtain clarification of the law and, if it is right about what the law is and what the evidence supports in this case, to vindicate the verdict of the jury and Oracle’s intellectual property rights as a copyright owner. Accepting the remittitur would be contrary to this objective.

And that means that the whole thing starts over again.

Calling the $1.3 billion award “grossly excessive,” U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton in February granted an SAP request to throw out the award. Hamilton said that Oracle never proved that it lost enough business to justify so large a judgment.

Oracle had won the award in November, after accusing SAP’s now-shuttered TomorrowNow unit of copying its software without paying appropriate licensing fees. It had been the largest judgment ever in a copyright infringement case.

At trial, Oracle accused SAP’s now-shuttered TomorrowNow business unit of illegally downloading Oracle software and then making several thousand copies of it, in order to avoid paying the relevant license fees that are Oracle’s financial bread and butter. Oracle ultimately won the claim, but then the fight turned to damages.

Lawyers for Oracle had argued that the company’s damages should be tied to the value of a hypothetical license that TomorrowNow would have had to pay for the software, had it been properly licensed. For its part, SAP had argued that, as competitors, damages should have been calculated based on profits lost by Oracle and gained by SAP as a result of the infringement, and as such is in a much lower range than what Oracle argued for.

The case has caused a lot of personal enmity between Oracle and SAP, as well as with Hewlett-Packard, especially during the 11-month period when former SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker was CEO of HP. Apotheker’s first days on the job at HP were marred by his apparent absence from HP headquarters, in what couldn’t help but look like an attempt to avoid being served with a subpoena. Maybe Oracle will try again.

This morning, a Mannheim Regional Court granted an injunction against Apple’s implementation of push email in iCloud and its predecessor, MobileMe. Sought by Motorola Mobility, which claims Apple has infringed its European patent on a “multiple pager status synchronization system and method,” the injunction could force Apple to deactivate push email in iCloud in Germany, though it will leave the broader service intact. Assuming it stands. And at this point, it’s not yet clear that it will. Apple, as one might imagine, is fighting it.

“Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid, and we’re appealing the court’s decision,” a company spokeswoman told AllThingsD.

The Munich I Regional Court on Wednesday evening denied Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus, Samsung’s flagship Android smartphone, and its Galaxy Tab 10.1N, a newer version of the tablet intended to further differentiate it from Apple’s iPad, keeping it immune from litigation.

That differentiation didn’t much come into play in this ruling, though.

At issue in this case was a touchscreen-related patent that Munich Regional Court Judge Andreas Mueller evidently felt wouldn’t stand up. Said Mueller, “Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection.”

So, two patent spats resolved — for the time being. But the broader intellectual property battle between Apple and Samsung continues to rage on in various courts around the world.

One thing Judge James Kleinberg did was dismiss a fraud claim by Oracle that said HP had been all sneaky when it concluded a settlement with Oracle that included an agreement to continue building software for systems using the Itanium chip. The settlement was struck only a few weeks before HP hired Léo Apotheker as its CEO and Ray Lane as its chairman.

But that’s not the important part of what Judge Kleinberg did. The most important aspect of yesterday’s action in Hewlett-Packard v. Oracle was the release of the unredacted version of Oracle’s cross-complaint. And it’s a juicy read.

I’ve posted the redacted version before. Now you can read all the bits that were blacked out.

What you’ll find is a lot of information that goes to the core of Oracle’s argument that HP has a lot to lose if the Itanium chip goes end of life, which is exactly what Oracle has said Intel plans to do. As the only major server vendor who sells boxes running Itanium chips, HP makes a lot of money — billions of dollars, according to a newly unredacted statement in the filing — on service-and-support contracts with its Itanium customers. As one HP executive is quoted on page four of the filing, without Itanium, HP would be “strategically screwed.”

Intel, on the other hand, was more or less ready to let the chip die. Having spent billions, dating back to 1989, to develop the Itanium chip, which outside of HP never saw any market success, Intel had to be convinced to keep building them. To do that, HP, the filing reads, paid Intel $440 million to keep Itanium chips in production for a few more generations, through 2014. The deal didn’t even cover the cost of the chips, as HP had to pay for them, as well, the filing reads. Oracle calls the arrangement a “pure pay-off to induce Intel to keep churning out processors that it really wanted to kill.”

And while there’s nothing specifically wrong with the arrangement by itself, Oracle’s point is that HP was misleading the marketplace about the true status of the keystone product in its Business Critical Service business. That unit, in no small part because of the uncertainty wrought by this lawsuit, saw its sales fall by 23 percent in HP’s most recent quarter.

Having won the release of the unredacted complaint, Oracle claimed something of a victory in a statement:

“Oracle is delighted that the Superior Court of the State of California, Santa Clara County, has rejected HP’s attempt to hide the truth about Itanium’s certain end of life from its customers, partners and own employees. We look forward to seeing all of the facts made public that demonstrate how HP has known for years that Itanium is end of life.”

It all sounds very reasonable, until you take into account the fact that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 and is now a big server vendor that competes with HP, and would by no real stretch of argument benefit from an exodus of HP’s Itanium customers toward other vendors. HP called the decision by Oracle to cease support for Itanium part of a “calculated business strategy” to mess up HP’s Itanium business and capture those customers. Yet the evidence so far suggests that the one benefiting from this fight is actually IBM.

HP claimed victory of its own, in a statement:

“HP is pleased that the Superior Court of the State of California, Santa Clara County, has rejected Oracle’s attempt to use a fraud claim to undo its contract with HP. We look forward to seeing the facts made public that demonstrate how Oracle’s March 2011 announcement to no longer develop software for Itanium servers was part of a calculated business strategy to drive hardware sales from Itanium to inferior Sun servers. This further demonstrates the fact that Oracle breached its contractual commitment to HP and ignored its repeated promises of support to our shared customers.”

HP has portrayed itself as the defender of the interests of Itanium customers, under attack by Oracle. As HP puts it in its statement, Oracle tried to induce customers running Oracle software on HP Itanium systems into replacing that hardware by limiting support and withholding software patches and bug fixes. “Customers were left without options to address bugs and other defects in their Oracle software,” HP says.

For HP, this is all a simple argument over whether or not Oracle can be held to the contract they agreed to in 2010.

The agreement stems from the circumstances of former HP CEO Mark Hurd’s resignation, and his subsequent hiring by Oracle as its president. HP sued Hurd and Oracle, and soon they settled. HP says that a clause in that settlement included a provision that Oracle would continue to port its database software to HP servers running the Itanium chip. Oracle has argued that this clause is not part of the final agreement. The settlement document itself remains confidential, but its details will likely emerge in the trial. Expect lots of arguing over different versions of the agreement.

I have embedded two documents below, for your reading pleasure. The first is Oracle’s unredacted cross-complaint, with all the blacked-out bits from the previous version now fully revealed for the world to see. Below that is a Case Management Conference Statement filed by HP lawyers, also unredacted, where it seeks to expose Oracle as making cold-blooded moves that would appear to be attempts to spur Oracle’s own software customers to abandon HP hardware. It’s not quite as juicy as Oracle’s document, but it has its moments, too. Enjoy them both:

HP v Oracle – Amended Cross Complaint

0077a 2011121 Hp Cmc Stmnt Unredacted

This morning, a Dutch court dismissed Apple’s appeal of an earlier ruling which denied it an injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple claims Samsung has copied the look and feel of the iPad, and that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringes its patented designs.

Issued by a higher court in The Hague, the ruling allows Samsung to continue selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the Netherlands. More importantly, it allows the company to continue distributing them to other European Union markets via the port of Rotterdam, through which it moves a lot of its EU merchandise.

Samsung was overjoyed by the decision.

“Samsung welcomes today’s ruling by the court in the Hague, which affirms the August 2011 ruling that the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is distinctive and does not infringe Apple’s intellectual property rights,” the company said in a statement. “This ruling again demonstrates that Apple’s products simply do not warrant the intellectual property protections that it believes.”

Also, it helps if they can’t steal it.

That’s the takeaway from a new survey from the IFPI, the music industry’s global trade group. It says global digital music sales grew 8 percent last year; that’s the first time that growth rate has increased since 2004, when the IFPI started tracking the statistic.

A good chunk of that increase may have come from subscription music services like Spotify and Deezer. The IFPI says subscription services have 13 million paying users, up from eight million last year.* There are also smaller increases in sales at more conventional outlets like Apple and Amazon, which generate much more revenue for the industry overall.

And while digital music sales still make up a minority of the music industry’s revenue worldwide, they are increasingly important: They now account for 32 percent of sales, up from 29 percent last year. (In the U.S., digital just edged physical last year, for the first time.)

All of which sounds fairly straightforward. But the IFPI is a trade group; it wants to hammer at one of its key points, which is that piracy is a big problem for the industry, which has seen sales cut in half since the Napster era. It figures more than a quarter of all Web users “access unauthorized services on a monthly basis.”

So, if piracy is a problem, why are sales increasing? In part, the trade group argues, because of anti-piracy legislation and industry moves.

The report highlights France’s “three strikes” rule, which allows the government to fine pirates and take away their Internet access. It cites a study arguing that French iTunes sales have increased more than 20 percent because of the policy, and the suggestion is clear: This would be a good idea worldwide.

The IFPI, which has singled out Google for criticism in the past, once again complains that the search engine makes it too easy to find illegal stuff. It also clearly went to the printer before the weekend, because its report refers to SOPA/PIPA as works in progress that are “set to be debated further in early 2012.”

*That number sounds several million high to me, but perhaps my rough estimate is missing a couple of big players.

First, a German court handed the South Korean company a setback, rejecting one of the seven patent infringement claims it had brought against Apple. In the court’s view, Samsung’s claim that Apple violates this particular patent, which relates to 3G/UMTS wireless standard, isn’t valid, though the presiding judge hasn’t yet explained why that’s the case.

Far more interesting is this second bit of news coming out of the German courts today. Evidently, Apple has decided to assert its slide-to-unlock patent against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus. This is the first time Apple has fingered the Nexus as an infringing device, and its decision to do so appears to be a significant escalation of the company’s campaign against Android. Not only is the Galaxy Nexus one of Samsung’s hero smartphones, it’s also Google’s Android 4.0 reference device.

In fact, it’s the only smartphone shipping with Android 4.0 right now. In other words, it’s the latest “pure Google” phone. Which is noteworthy.

“Judging by the first three weeks of 2012, Apple’s intellectual property assertions against Android continue to escalate,” patent analyst Florian Mueller told AllThingsD. “Samsung appears to be no less determined to fight. Apple’s supplemental infringement contentions targeting the Android 4.0 lead device are an unequivocal signal to Google that Apple doesn’t shy away from a frontal assault.”

News Group Newspapers, a unit of News Corp.’s U.K. newspaper business, recently reached about 36 new settlement agreements, including with actor Jude Law and soccer player Ashley Cole, according to Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer representing phone-hacking victims at the High Court in London on Thursday.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Noting that some 700,000 Android devices are activated every day — each one built around Oracle’s copyrighted Java APIs — the company figures “each day’s worth of activations likely generates approximately $10 million in annual mobile advertising revenue for Google.”

So $3.65 billion — which is over $1 billion more than the $2.5 billion Google claimed Android was generating in ad revenues last October.

Why the discrepancy? That’s tough to say, as Oracle doesn’t explain the calculation used to arrive at that figure or the numbers it plugged into it, aside from the 700,000 Android activations per day metric that was provided by Android boss Andy Rubin last December. Over at FOSS Patents, Florian Mueller speculates that Oracle’s number is based on the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user, though again no rationale for it is offered.

In any event, $3.65 billion is a far cry from the up to $6.1 billion in damages Oracle has claimed Google could owe it for the alleged violations, though that first sum doesn’t reflect Android’s full value. Said Oracle, “This revenue does not even include all the other value Android generates for Google, ranging from Android Market revenue, to other Android-related services, to ensuring that Google will not be locked out of the mobile business, to lucrative relationships with manufacturers of myriad devices on which Android can and does run, to the inordinately valuable access Android provides to customers for its new social network service, Google+.”

UPDATE: Looks like that $2.5 billion run rate I mentioned earlier is not exclusive to Android. Rather, it includes all mobile revenues. So the discrepancy between Oracle’s number and revenue generated by Android is even larger than originally though.

Apple has filed suit against Samsung once again in Germany, looking to ban the sales of a number of smartphones and tablets. Filed in Dusseldorf Regional Court and based on a number of design patents, the suit targets Samsung’s Galaxy S II and its Galaxy S Plus, along with eight other smartphones.

Reached for comment, Apple reiterated the same line it has been using to upbraid Samsung throughout the pair’s legal spat:

“This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”

Late Tuesday, the company filed suit against Apple and HTC claiming they’ve infringed upon a handful of patents on technologies for transmitting digital images from cameras and other devices.

Kodak’s complaint covers Apple’s iPad 2, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPod touch, and a number of HTC tablets and phones — the Flyer, EVO View 4G, Vivid, Hero S, etc. And it seeks a proscription against further infringement as well as damages. But what Kodak’s really looking for here are the royalties.

As Tim Lynch, Kodak’s Chief IP officer, notes in a statement announcing the suit, “We remain open to negotiating a fair and amicable agreement with these companies, which has always been our preference and our practice with other licensees.”

News of the suits comes amid reports that Kodak is contemplating Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company’s in no hurry to resolve its legal claims against Android smartphone vendors like Samsung, HTC and Motorola, says Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore. Instead, it’s likely holding out for a big payoff.

Which is a wise move, because in doing so Apple is undermining Android in a number of ways. The threat of litigation is obviously a deterrent — or at the very least, a consideration — to any handset manufacturer mulling Android as a potential OS for its devices. And for those OEM’s that have already been sued, it significantly raises the cost of supporting Android.

So realistically, expediency isn’t the game here. The longer these cases drag on, the better it is for Apple, especially if the company ends up prevailing in the end. Whitmore seems to believe it’s the likely outcome and figures Apple could end up collecting a fee of $10 for every Android device sold, which would add about $35 to its share price. And though less likely, if it wins outright and convinces a court to ban some Android handsets, the upside is even greater, as you can see in the chart below.

“Although Apple has not expressed a desire to settle, most believe a settlement could occur resulting in a $10-per-unit software licensing fee,” Whitmore says. “… Beyond the monetary benefit to Apple, a settlement would make Android-based handsets incrementally more expensive and less competitive due to the higher OS cost and would likely support incremental iOS share gains vs. Android. … Given the upside potential associated with an outright win, we don’t expect Apple to settle anytime soon.”

Over at FOSS Patents, Florian Mueller takes issue with Whitmore’s $35-per-share figure.

Samsung, Hitachi, Sharp, Chimei Innolux, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Epson Imaging Devices and HannStar Display, as well as some of their affiliates, will pay $538 million to settle allegations brought by eight state attorneys general that they conspired over eight years to fix prices on LCDs used in everything from computer monitors and notebooks to televisions and mobile phones.

Of that sum, about $501 million will be used to subsidize a refund program for consumers. The remainder will be distributed to the state governments of Arkansas, California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, New York, West Virginia and Wisconsin to settle their penalty claims. The settling companies have also agreed to participate in antitrust compliance programs.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user Frank Gruber)

Groklaw reported the notifications on Friday. See the full filing here. These patent reexaminations are a routine part of patent lawsuits. One party, usually the one that’s alleged to be infringing, asks the patent office to reexamine the patent and decide whether or not the patent should have been issued in the first place. A rejection isn’t by any means a final nail in the coffin in Oracle’s infringement case against Google. But it doesn’t exactly help Oracle, either.

Oracle has six months to appeal the patent office’s finding, and it can also, as a final step, sue the patent office itself. But these things rarely go that far.

And these rejections are sometimes meaningless to the final outcome of a lawsuit. In 2005, as part of its epic patent litigation against NTP — the case that nearly barred the import of BlackBerry devices into the United States — Research In Motion won several rejections from the patent office, like this one, which I wrote about at the time, only to suffer later defeats in court that led it to pay a $612 million settlement.

Oracle has claimed that Google owes it more than $6 billion for parts of its Java software that were used in the Android mobile operating system; Oracle took over Java after it acquired Sun Microsystems last year. Google has argued that Oracle’s claims for damages are flawed. After face-to-face talks between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page failed in September, the trial had been expected to begin in October. But it was delayed, and is now expected to get underway in 2012.

Earlier this month, the company was forced to change the name of its forthcoming BBX operating system when Basis International filed for a temporary restraining order, claiming RIM was infringing on its trademark. Now it’s being challenged over BBM, the nickname for its popular instant-messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger.

Broadcast industry group BBM Canada is dragging RIM into court, claiming trademark infringement. And it has good reason to do so: It owns the trademarks on “BBM” in both the U.S. and Canada. The group seeks an injunction prohibiting RIM’s use of the BBM mark, as well as damages.

“We want our name back,” BBM Canada President and CEO Jim MacLeod told the Globe and Mail. “I find it kind of amazing that this wouldn’t have been thought about before they decided to use the name.”

Seriously. Particularly since BBM Canada has been around for more than 60 years.

And then there’s the fact that RIM’s 2009 attempt to register the BBM trademark with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office was denied on the grounds that it was already in use.

But evidently this meant little to RIM, which continues to use the BBM mark to this day over BBM Canada’s protestations, and will soon have to defend its behavior in court. A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for January 11, 2012.

Update: Reached for comment, RIM offered AllThingsD the following statement:

“Since its launch in July 2005, BlackBerry Messenger has become a tremendously popular social networking service. In 2010, RIM started to formally adopt the BBM acronym, which had, at that point, already been organically coined and widely used by BlackBerry Messenger customers as a natural abbreviation of the BlackBerry Messenger name. The services associated with RIM’s BBM offering clearly do not overlap with BBM Canada’s services and the two marks are therefore eligible to co-exist under Canadian trademark law. The two companies are in different industries and have never been competitors in any area. We believe that BBM Canada is attempting to obtain trademark protection for the BBM acronym that is well beyond the narrow range of the services it provides and well beyond the scope of rights afforded by Canadian trademark law. RIM has therefore asked the Court to dismiss the application and award costs to RIM. Further, for clarity, RIM’s application to register BBM as a trademark with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is pending and we are confident that a registration will eventually issue. The inference by BBM Canada that CIPO has refused RIM’s BBM trademark application is quite frankly very misleading.”

While it makes sense that new CEO Meg Whitman probably wants some fresh blood in the legal office, the move comes at a delicate time legally for HP, as the company is heading into a trial with Oracle over the Itanium affair, not to mention routine shareholder lawsuits stemming from its $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy.

While a search is underway to replace Holston, HP said, David Healy, a partner in the Mergers & Acquisition Group at Fenwick & West, will serve in the interim as HP’s general counsel. Healy advised HP on its acquisition of Vertica and the deal to sell its video collaboration assets to Polycom.

Holston is former federal prosecutor who had been a partner at the law firm of Morgan Lewis when then-CEO Mark Hurd brought him in to investigate the messy pretexting scandal that rocked HP in 2006. (Here’s a transcript of Holston in a press conference explaining the firm’s work from September of that year.) In the book on that scandal, Anthony Bianco’s, “The Big Lie” Holston is portrayed as having saved Hurd from having to resign amid the scandal that hit when he was only a year on the job.

A profile of Holston by Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, described him as Hurd’s “consigliere,” who ultimately had to turn against him when Hurd’s troubles involving a marketing contractor and expense reports led him to resign last year.

HP’s statement is below.

Michael J. Holston to Leave HP

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire -12/12/11)- HP today announced that Michael J. Holston, executive vice president and general counsel, will leave the company to pursue other opportunities.

Prior to his joining HP, Holston supported the company as external counsel for more than 10 years on a variety of litigation and regulatory matters.

“Mike has been an exceptional leader at HP and a great contributor to the company’s mission,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “The entire company wishes him well in his future endeavors.”

HP also announced that David W. Healy, partner and co-chair, Mergers & Acquisition Group, Fenwick & West LLP, will act as HP’s general counsel on an interim basis. Healy represented HP on its recent acquisition of Vertica and its agreement to sell its Video Collaboration business unit to Polycom. Healy will oversee all legal activities during the interim period.

The company further announced that a formal search is underway for a replacement. Candidates from both inside and outside the company will be considered.

It’s a definite win for Motorola, particularly if Apple is unable to secure a stay of the injunction during appeal. That said, it may not be quite as bad for Cupertino as it seems. It’s certainly not going to keep the company’s iOS devices out of the single largest market in the EU over the holidays.

Why? Even if Motorola decides to bear the risk of enforcing a ruling that might be overturned later, the injunction applies to the importation of new iOS device shipments. It doesn’t apply to existing inventory. And sources say Apple has plenty of iPhones and iPads on hand in Germany already — enough that it’s not too concerned about losing out on the Christmas consumer binge there. The company even says as much in the brief statement it issued on the matter today.

“We’re going to appeal the court’s ruling right away,” an Apple spokesperson told AllThingsD. “Holiday shoppers in Germany should have no problem finding the iPad or iPhone they want.”

But what about after the holidays, when that inventory begins to run out?

Again, Apple’s fate largely depends on whether it’s able to stay the injunction pending appeal, assuming Motorola attempts to enforce it. Beyond that, there’s the validity of the two 3G patents at issue in the case, and whether or not they are standards-essential and subject to fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms. More on that over at FOSS Patents.

On Friday, Australia’s High Court dismissed Apple’s bid to have a ban on the sale of the 10.1 extended. And it denied the motion “with costs,” slapping Cupertino with the bill for all the legal wrangling.

It’s an important victory for Samsung, one that brings the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to retailers’ shelves just in time for the biggest shopping season of the year. And it’s another setback for Apple’s legal campaign against it, which now spans some 10 countries.

Today’s decision by Australia’s High Court follows a recent U.S. court ruling denying Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction prohibiting sales of some of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones and tablets in the States.

Our legal efforts served as an essential educational tool: Fans know far more now about copyright laws and the legal consequences of stealing music than ever before. Before initiating lawsuits in 2003, only 35 percent of people knew file-sharing on P2P was illegal; afterward, awareness grew to 70 percent.

— Liz Kennedy, communications director for the RIAA, in response to an article in the Tennessean, which stated that the Association’s legal initiatives had failed because “the suits ultimately proved ineffective in ending systematic online piracy”

This morning, a French court denied Samsung’s request for an injunction banning sales of the iPhone 4S in France, sought on the grounds that it violated the South Korean company’s wireless-communications patents.

Describing Samsung’s plea for an injunction as a “disproportionate” measure, the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris ruled Samsung must reimburse Apple $134,100 for its legal fees. But it also denied Apple’s request for damages and said Samsung’s infringement lawsuit against its rival can move forward.

So another loss for Samsung, though the company will have a chance to take another shot at Apple soon. Next week, a Milan court will hold a hearing to review the company’s request for a ban on the iPhone 4S in Italy.

The ITC had been scheduled to issue its decision on the matter tomorrow, but on Monday said it would delay it until December 14. So it will be another nine days before we see a final verdict in the case.

If the ITC rules in Apple’s favor and determines that HTC’s Android smartphones violate the four patents at issue on the case, it could ban their importation. And that would be a nasty setback for HTC, which might then miss out on the lucrative holiday shopping season.

A victory for HTC, on the other hand, could set the stage for a settlement with Apple, which was recently vindicated in another ITC case in which it was accused of violating the patents of HTC’s S3 Graphics unit.

Oracle paints a picture of HP desperate to preserve the profits it makes on support and service contracts generated from customers using Integrity servers, cutting arrangements with Intel to keep pumping out Itanium chips that no one but HP buys, and which Intel would secretly like to forget in order to focus on its highly profitable line of mainstream Xeon server chips. Oracle describes an agreement between HP and Intel called the “Itanium Collaboration Agreement” and calls it a “a pure pay-off to induce Intel to keep churning out processors that it really wanted to kill.”

Here are some other interesting highlights. Remember yesterday how I said that the main issue, at least from HP’s perspective in this suit, is whether or not Oracle agreed to continue to port its software to HP-UX so that it could run on HP’s Integrity servers that use Intel’s Itanium chip.

HP has argued that when the two companies settled a lawsuit concerning Oracle’s hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd, that Oracle agreed to do just that. Oracle has argued that it agreed to no such thing and so is perfectly within its rights to walk way from the Itanium platform.

Pick up the action on page 27. You read how, as Oracle tells it, HP sought to insert language into that settlement that included an Oracle pledge to stick with Itanium, which Oracle rejected twice.

It quotes an email from Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley to HP lawyers proposing the following langauge in a draft agreement:

Reaffirmation of the Oracle-HP Partnership. Oracle and HP reaffirm their commitment to their longstanding strategic relationship and their mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers. Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms and HP will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware in a manner consistent with that partnership.

HP, Oracle says, then responded with the following proposed language:

Reaffirmation of the Oracle-HP Partnership. Oracle and HP reaffirm their commitment to their longstanding strategic relationship and their mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers. Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms and HP will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware in a manner consistent with that partnership. Oracle will continue to support all ongoing versions of HP-UX with Oracle’s relevant database, middleware and application products with the availability, marketing and pricing in competitive terms that Oracle has provided HP for the past five years. Oracle will continue to provide access to the Java technology and tools such that HP can continue to support its operating systems (e.g., HP-UX, OpenVMS, Nonstop) in a manner similar to the way it does today. Oracle agrees to continue to provide Solaris for HP’s x86 platforms in a manner similar to what it provides HP today. Oracle agrees to continue to purchase HP server hardware for internal use at a rate similar to what Oracle purchases today.

Oracle rejected it, and by its account, no mention of Itanium or HP-UX was in the final version of the settlement that both signed. The final version was nearly identical to the draft that Daley proposed above. This sequence of events and what the final version of the agreement actually says will be a key issue in the trial. A lot of the rest of the stuff is a bit of Oracle bluster, though it’s interesting bluster.

For instance, Oracle accuses HP of having “fraudulently induced Oracle to enter into the very contract” at the heart of the lawsuit, by negotiating at a time when people on the HP side would have known that the company was about to hire Léo Apotheker and Ray Lane as CEO and chairman. As Oracle puts it:

“Given the well-documented animosity between Oracle and Messrs. Apotheker and Lane, HP knew that had Oracle known of HP’s imminent plans to hire these individuals, Oracle would not have signed the Hurd Agreement, especially any ‘partnership’ commitments or other business restrictions … unrelated to Mr. Hurd’s move to Oracle. … HP had a duty to disclose this exclusively-held material information. Instead, HP knowingly and actively withheld this information.”

HP naturally isn’t taking the latest round of accusations from Oracle silently. The company just issued a statement basically accusing Oracle of trying to distract us all from the fact that it’s in breach of a contract. And the key phrase in the contract — all that back and forth between the Oracle and HP lawyers above — is this one: “An agreement to continue to work together as the companies have,” meaning work together as they did when Oracle still supported Itanium.

This all started back in March when Oracle said it would stop software development for Itanium. It prompted a lot of shocked and angry pronouncements from HP and Intel and counter-claims from Oracle. Itanium customers then rallied to its defense and sought to change Oracle’s mind. It didn’t work. Months passed, and HP resorted to a lawsuit in June that has seen many colorful arguments, and even the odd pop-culture reference.

HP’s press-release rebuttal is below and the full PDF of Oracle’s filing — complete with all the redactions is below that.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 2, 2011 – HP today issued the following statement in response to Oracle’s amended cross-complaint in the Intel Itanium litigation:

Today’s filing is another example of Oracle attempting to distract from the undeniable fact that it has breached its contractual commitment to HP and ignored its repeated promises of support to our shared customers.

Here are the facts:

— On Sept. 20, 2010, Mark Hurd, Oracle and HP entered into a written settlement agreement. Pursuant to that agreement, HP dismissed its lawsuit against Hurd, and did not further challenge Hurd’s employment at Oracle. In exchange, Oracle contractually committed that it would “continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms … in a manner consistent with [the Oracle-HP] partnership as it existed prior to Oracle’s hiring of Hurd.”

— Oracle confirmed that it was agreeing to continue to port its software products to HP’s platforms in the same manner as it had done prior to its hiring of Hurd. In an email sent to HP on Sept. 12, 2010, Oracle’s general counsel wrote that this provision was “an agreement to continue to work together as the companies have – with Oracle porting products to HP’s platform and HP supporting the ported products and the parties engaging in joint marketing opportunities – for the mutual benefit of customers.”

— Oracle now claims that this provision does not require Oracle to continue to port its database and other software to HP’s platforms. Yet that is exactly what the contract says, and that is exactly what Oracle committed to do in order to convince HP that Oracle’s hiring of Hurd would not alter the relationship between the companies or be used unfairly to undermine HP’s business.

— Oracle initially tried to justify its Itanium decision by falsely ascribing to Intel the position that Itanium is at end of life. Due to Intel’s unequivocal and repeated statements to the marketplace that Itanium is not at an end of life, Oracle has been forced to revise its rationale.

— In its cross-complaint, Oracle tries to rationalize its Itanium decision by arguing that, despite the undisputed existence of committed support for Itanium that stretches to the end of this decade and beyond, Intel would not have made this commitment to Itanium if it were not for a contractual agreement with HP.

— The existence of such a contract completely undermines Oracle’s stated rationale for discontinuing Itanium support by taking the future of Itanium out of the realm of speculation and firmly establishing as a matter of undeniable fact that there is a committed Itanium roadmap that extends out toward the end of this decade. Oracle has the relevant Itanium roadmaps in its possession, yet it continues to refuse to discuss those roadmaps.

— What has become very clear in the course of the litigation is that Oracle’s claim in March 2011 that it was ending support for Itanium because Itanium was at or near an “end of life” was false and a pure pretext to hide Oracle’s real purpose: to take away the choice of Itanium from customers and restrict the competition faced by its Sun servers.

— Indeed, Oracle’s internal documents make clear that its announcement in March 2011 that it would no longer develop or support software for Itanium servers was implemented as part of a business strategy to leverage Oracle’s dominance in database software to try to force Itanium customers to purchase Sun servers. The tactics employed by Oracle in support of this purpose included pricing misconduct, withholding of benchmarking scores for HP servers run on Oracle software, and abusing customers on support issues.

— Oracle is in breach of its contractual commitments to HP, and it has failed to honor its promises to customers. Oracle should be addressing and rectifying this conduct rather than making up claims against HP.

70777_xREDACTEDxxAmendedxCrossxComplaint