Being the huge fan of “Top Chef” that I am — hellllloooo, Padma! — it was even more a treat to see former Microsoft legend, controversial patent grabber and full-time fiddler Nathan Myhrvold as a guest judge this past week on the current season of the popular cable television show.

For those who usually associate him with geekery, he is also a big foodie and the author of fancy tome “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.”

Right now, the six-volume, 2,400-page book set retails for $499 on Amazon. As described on the site: “The authors and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes.”

“Top Chef” is now set in Texas, so the topic was barbecue, an apparent fave of the techie too. But I really liked the competitor chefs’ race in the Quickfire Challenge to pull off some feat of molecular gastronomy best.

A side of patent troll pâté anyone?

Here are the videos:

This is par for the course in mobile land, of course. And patents are the primary motivator in Google’s pending acquisition of Motorola Mobility; supposedly, the 25,000 patents Google would pick up in the deal will help protect it in legal fights just like these. Assuming antitrust regulators sign off on the deal, that is.

Back to the present tense: As Florian Mueller notes, the suit means BT joins the likes of Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and eBay, all of whom accuse Android of violating patent law. You can read the complete filing here.

“Based on our supply chain channel checks in Asia led by Kevin Chang, Citi’s Taipei-based hardware research analyst, we believe an Amazon Smartphone will be launched in 4Q12. Based on our supply chain check, we believe FIH is now jointly developing the phone with Amazon. However, we believe that Amazon will pay NRE (non-recurring engineering fees) to FIH but the device and multiple components will actually be manufactured by Hon Hai’s TMS business group (the same business group that makes Amazon’s E-reader and the 8.9” Amazon tablet). We believe the smartphone will adopt Texas Instrument’s OMAP 4 processor and is very likely to adopt QCOM’s dual mode 6-series standalone baseband given QCOM has been a long-time baseband supplier for Amazon’s E-reader.”

Mahaney and his team guess that Amazon’s phone may cost it $150 to $170 to build, and it’s conceivable that the company will sell it for something close to that price: “For a normal brand like HTC, they need to price the product at US$243 to make 30% gross margin. If Amazon is actually willing to lose some money on the device, the price gap could be even bigger.”

Mahaney’s note doesn’t spell out that the phone will use Google’s Android operating system, but it suggests that will be the case by positing that Amazon will need to pay Microsoft an “OS royalty” — Microsoft has recently been able to extract royalty payments from other Android hardware partners.

Today, Samsung came out and said pretty much the same thing about Apple. In an interview with the Associated Press, Lee Younghee, Samsung’s head of global marketing for mobile communications, said the company will come harder after Apple for its own alleged infringements, business relationship between the two companies be damned.

“We’ve been quite respectful and also passive in a way,” Younghee said. “However, we shouldn’t be … anymore. We’ll be pursuing our rights for this in a more aggressive way from now on. … We believe Apple is free riding [on our innovations].”

In a brief opposing Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States, Samsung argues that one of the iPad design patents at issue in the case is predated by a prop used in Kubrick’s 1968 film.

“Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded online. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.”

In other words, if Samsung “slavishly” copied Apple, Apple equally slavishly copied a design featured in Kubrick’s seminal science fiction film.

Will the court agree? It seems unlikely, but who knows. There certainly are similarities, and Samsung clearly feels they’re worth noting. But are they substantial enough to undermine Apple’s legal offensive? In any event, this has got to be one of the greatest prior-art defenses ever mounted.

It wasn’t until dinner this past Sunday night that CEO Léo Apotheker told Todd Bradley, the head of its Personal Systems Group, that he was about to push key parts of Bradley’s huge unit off the cliff.

That included stopping selling hardware — smartphones and TouchPad tablets — based on the webOS it acquired from Palm last year, a $1.2 billion deal that Bradley played a big part in.

In addition, HP said it was considering spinning out its PC business and would “explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”

But, until a few days ago, several sources close to the situation said, Bradley knew nothing of these plans and neither did webOS’s key driver of late, former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein.

This surprising lack of disclosure by HP to two of its key execs begs the question: Will they stay or will they go now?

According to sources, staying put is the plan for both for now, although it depends on what such a spinoff will look like.

It’s clear at this point that Bradley — who was once the CEO of Palm himself and was once considered the most likely successor to former CEO Mark Hurd, before Hurd’s sudden resignation last year — is the leading CEO candidate of its spun-out independent PC company if that’s what HP decides to do.

But it’s not a lock, either. And, apparently, Bradley has not been locked in with regards to a spinoff either and would likely have a lot of offers from tech companies in Silicon Valley to choose from if he wanted.

“Who will they get if Bradley goes at this point, if they want to spin it off?” said one person at the company.

But, added another: “Bradley is in the catbird seat if he wants to be and it’s his to lose.”

That depends, of course, on what his is.

Questions include:

Will that new company include any of the consumer part of the printer business — a huge cash cow — if HP is indeed leaving the arena?

Will webOS go with the new set-up, so that it can take advantage of the patents and licensing income?

Will HP continue to be the brand name on the devices this computer company spinoff would make?

These are just a few of the issues in a deal of untold complexity. But perhaps the most obvious one is who would get custody of Rubinstein?

To begin: Bradley is a big fan and would certainly want him around if there were a spinoff, said several sources.

But to do what?

Rubinstein, a well-known tech exec, had been leading the webOS efforts for HP, but was recently moved upstairs to a larger but fuzzy role, to run product development and innovation for the PSG unit. He has been reporting to Bradley.

At the time, the move was seen by many as the first step out the door by Rubinstein, with one person joking that “he’d much rather be at his Mexican beach house than HP.”

Among the disgruntlements: Several sources said Rubinstein felt that TouchPad wasn’t ready to ship and that Apotheker has reneged on a public promise not to until the tablet was “perfect.”

That ire is no surprise, since the device was then subject to tough criticism, including by AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, who noted in his review:

“… In my view, despite its attractive and different user interface, this first version is simply no match for the iPad. It suffers from poor battery life, a paucity of apps and other deficits.”

In addition, unlike others there, Rubinstein has been more of a product guy and not an HP lifer. That begs the question of whether he’d like to sign up to another big company stint, even if he had more control.

“He’s been to that party before, and the reality is that he is not a career big company person,” said one person.

One important note: Rubinstein was unable to make webOS work when Palm was already a standalone independent company. And, although a new HP spinoff would be huge and better funded, it is still very much an uphill and competitive battle on the computer, smartphone and tablet fronts.

In addition, keeping a competitive operating system going is also a costly bear of an issue.

“It’s a cyclical, high-velocity business and there are other huge players from Apple and Google in smartphones and tablets to Lenovo and Dell in PCs,” said another source. “There might be a lot of great products in the pipeline for webOS, but it will not be easy to make them a success.”

That said, noted another person who knows Rubinstein well, “he really cares about webOS and does not want to see it go away.”

That might be true, although that is just what might happen if HP decides to sell it off to someone else or makes the spinoff a difficult endeavor.

In that case, it’s an offer Bradley and Rubinstein can refuse.

Related posts

• Hewlett-Packard Says Goodbye to PCs, webOS
• HP Pulls Plug on webOS Hardware, Leaves OS Future in Doubt
• HP And webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Liveblogging HP’s “Everything Including the Kitchen Sink” Conference Call
• HP’s Apotheker: We Struck Out with WebOS, but Maybe Someone Else Wants a Swing?
• Viral Video: Like Palm’s Creepy Naked Lady, TouchPad’s Floating Celeb Heads Get the HP Boot
• Licensing webOS May Not Be Much of an Option for HP
• Hewlett-Packard’s PC Business: What Happens Next?
• Worth More Dead Than Alive: Could HP Turn a Profit on Palm’s Patents?
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?

“We will be looking with interest as further details of the proposed transaction become clear,” said John Thorne, Verizon’s senior vice president and deputy general counsel. “But, at first glance, to the extent that this deal might bring some stability to the ongoing smartphone patent disputes, that would be a welcome development.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Let’s face it: Everyone in Silicon Valley — one way or another — fashions themselves as the next Steve Jobs.

And why not? Both the professional and even personal story of the legendary Apple CEO — which will be chronicled in November in a major book — are the stuff of tech legend and envy: Iconic, in charge, decisive, elegant, innovative, phoenix-like and visionary.

And, of course, more than just a little bit terrifying.

So why not Larry Page, too, and why not now?

One issue: By temperament and action — by which I mean genetically hyper-competitive and hammer-time aggressive — he’s been more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has been the Yin to Jobs’ Yang in their deeply interconnected careers over the last decades.

As I wrote before Page took over again as Google’s CEO earlier this year:

After our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

The latest incarnation of that has been Page’s move — bold for now and we’ll-see later — to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which Google announced yesterday.

By all accounts, Page was the key driver of the deal inside Google, where he now reigns firmly.

Although neither Gates nor Jobs has used acquisitions much as a key weapon in their arsenals, the size and scope of the deal is pure Gates: A focused, overwhelming and competitor-scaring display of might that speaks of industry dominance and play-to-destroy aspirations, masking what is also very reactive.

If Page’s doubling down on mobile reminds you a bit of Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum in 1995, that’s because the move-now tone is the same.

And, also, in that it is more than just a little bit sneaky. Case in point: Google’s yammering on about the importance of Motorola’s patents in the deal. While the patent love is true and an important element, bolstering Google’s own weak portfolio, it’s also a bit of a feint by the search giant, which can simply never come out and say what it is actually up to.

Which is to be the dominant and overwhelming player in the mobile market that Google sees as critical to its future.

“The company obviously wants everyone to focus on the patents, but its ambitions are so much larger in mobile,” said one person close to the situation. “So it underplays as it overplays.”

Indeed, in the time I covered Google, it has always been my experience when the search giant insists stringently on one thing, Page and others are playing a more complex version of “Star Trek” three-dimensional chess.

As the New York Times’ DealBook noted correctly:

If there’s any question about Google’s motivation to own a handset maker rather than just a portfolio of patents, consider this: InterDigital, a licensing company that owns some 8,000 wireless patents and has another 10,000 patent applications being processed, has been up for auction. Many industry insiders were sure that if Google were serious about acquiring a portfolio of patents, InterDigital would be its target. The company’s market value is only about $3 billion and it doesn’t come with all the baggage of Motorola’s handset business.

That’s exactly right, because Page’s ambition is about Google playing a big part in the mobile market — which is humanity’s next critical platform in computing — for its interlocked ecosystem of Google products — from its flagship search to social networking via Google+ to Gmail to its latest Google Wallet initiative to Google Maps to Google Voice.

In other words, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it.

At the heart of it is a desire to make and completely control the object at the center of the virtuous circle: The mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, tablet or whatever doodad you might wear around your neck.

In fact, as I also remember from Google’s earliest days, Page did sport a lot of such contraptions back then, such as a communicator of some sort he once joyfully showed off to me that allowed him to reach Brin quickly. Later, it was a kind of pollution sensor that took its place.

My recollection from that time was that Page adored such objects, visibly inspired by the idea of digital devices that delivered a myriad of helpful and smart services to users as they moved around the world.

You know, like an Apple iPhone, the ground-breaking technical achievement that Jobs rendered unto the world less than a decade ago, changing everything.

With Android and Page’s firm backing, Google quickly and smartly jumped partway into that market with its powerful and fast-growing mobile operating system.

Now, like Jobs, I have no doubt Page wants to own and control the whole value chain to solidify what Google started several years ago and which is its best hope to vault into the next era of computing.

It’s a leap that Gates and Microsoft largely failed at, not for lack of trying — something else Page has to have taken note of.

So, perhaps by making things — maybe even beautiful things like Jobs — Page will transform himself from a Gates into a Jobs.

Or, more likely, a little bit of both.

Until that reckoning, here is a terrific video of Spock playing 3D chess with Captain James T. Kirk — and, yes, he does look freakishly like Page here:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

On Sunday, I motored up to Petaluma to be on This Week in Tech, or TWiT, at its new offices. Hosted by Leo Laporte, it’s a roundtable on the news of the week in the digital sector.

The other panelists included GigaOm’s Om Malik, CNET’s Rafe Needleman and Revision3′s Patrick Norton, talking about everything from the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC to electronic tattoos to the patent issues foiling Google (who knew?) to delicious cupcakes not eaten by Om.

Enjoy:

With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, the iconic but struggling maker of mobile devices, Google has put a huge stake in the ground in this highly competitive market and thereby shaken up the entire ecosystem.

A lot of this is about patents, as Google CEO Larry Page said in his blog post about the megadeal this morning, and about acquiring a bigger portfolio that Google has long sought for its Android mobile operating system and has been unsuccessful at getting for itself, despite onerous efforts. Since Motorola has been in the mobile arena for so long, it has a large trove of important ones.

But the dramatic acquisition by Google is also a declaration that mobile is more important to it than the skein of alliances it has built for Android with phone makers worldwide, as part of its objective of making it the dominant mobile platform for smartphones and tablets globally.

While Google has been reaching out to other hardware partners to assure them, and has said they all will remain the same in Android-land, the large mobile manufacturers who have placed their trust in Google — especially Samsung or HTC — have to be wondering what to do now.

Make no mistake — they already resent Google from time to time, the way Compaq or Dell has resented Microsoft in the PC business.

But, since Google already showed favoritism to Motorola by letting them do the first Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom (although it didn’t do any good), that discomfort will only increase now.

While Google managed to get them into lockstep on today’s announcement, with a whole Web page titled “Quotes From Android Partners,” each of them using the exact same phrase “defending Android” in their quotes feels a little like they are victims of Stockholm syndrome.

Yes, we concur with everything the Borg tells us to! Defending! Android! We’re Droids too! (Calling Patty Hearst, stat!)

The impact on everyone — from Microsoft and its partner Nokia to Apple to Research In Motion and, also, to all the wireless carriers — will be felt immediately.

And, of course, by government regulators, who have watched warily as Google has marched into business after adjacent business to its core search one.

This deal — which will require approval — is sure to even further put all of Google’s businesses in the crosshairs of rivals, who will agitate for fervent investigations.

While Android has been conceived at Google and has an “autonomous unit” with the company — run by longtime mobile vet Andy Rubin — it has now entered a new and perhaps dangerous phase for all involved, including Google.

Because while such a union is not uncommon in the mobile business — Apple and RIM do software and hardware together and Google has released its own Nexus phone (made by others) — no one has done it via acquisition and in such a definitive way.

And what an acquisition it is. Or, perhaps more accurately, could be.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

(Image courtesy of the United States Department of Energy)

Fark.com publisher Drew Curtis says he’s settled a nonsensical suit brought by something called Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC, which claimed Curtis’s site and a host of others had infringed a patent for “news release generation.”

The take-away is that Curtis says he was able to get Gooseberry to drop the suit without having to pay the patent holder a dime; he says he would have countersued but didn’t want to spend the money.

Well worth reading all of Curtis’s words on the topic, but if you’re pressed for time his Fark-ready headline will do: “Patent-infringement lawsuit against Fark settled for zero dollars. Also, patent trolls suck hairy donkey balls.”

Gooseberry’s original suit, filed in January, named several big Web publishing companies, including Condé Nast, Yahoo and AOL, via TechCrunch (you can read the complaint here via another entertainingly titled post).

Curtis says that Yahoo settled “a while back” and that Condé Nast settled this week; he says AOL is still fighting the suit. I’ve asked all three companies, as well as Gooseberry’s lawyer, for comment.

Issued by the Regional Court of Düsseldorf, the injunction prohibits the sale and importation of the Galaxy 10.1 throughout the European Union except for the Netherlands on the grounds that it infringes the iPad’s design (here’s the original complaint in German). The decision carries with it the threat of fines of up to $350,000 for each violation and potential jail time for Samsung’s leadership if the infringement continues.

Apple confirmed the ruling, but declined to issue a new comment on it, referring me back to an earlier statement: “It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”

UPDATE: Samsung issued the following statement on the ruling, claiming it was taken unawares by it.

Samsung is disappointed with the court’s decision and we intend to act immediately to defend our intellectual property rights through the ongoing legal proceedings in Germany and will continue to actively defend these rights throughout the world. The request for injunction was filed with no notice to Samsung, and the order was issued without any hearing or presentation of evidence from Samsung. We will take all necessary measures to ensure Samsung’s innovative mobile communications devices are available to customers in Europe and around the world.This decision by the court in Germany in no way influences other legal proceedings filed with the courts in Europe and elsewhere.

After Google’s legal head David Drummond let forth with a blog post about how Microsoft and Apple had formed an evil patent cabal against the search giant, the software giant’s PR head Frank Shaw was not having any of it.

In his post, Drummond had claimed the pair ganged up on Google and had not offered to partner over key former Novell patents, in an attempt to stop the growth of its Android mobile operating system.

Except not, according to an email that Shaw posted on Twitter from Google’s legal counsel Kent Walker to Microsoft’s legal head Brad Smith.

Tweeted Shaw: “Free advice for David Drummond – next time check with Kent Walker before you blog. :)”

It was followed by the image of the email, in which Walker seemed to turn down an offer of a partnership over the patents. “After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn’t be advisable for us on this one.”

Smith also piled on on Twitter, noting: “Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.”

Wax on, Google!

Here’s the image of the email:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

The imaging company recently said it is considering the sale of 1,100 patents, or 10% of the company’s portfolio. Kodak said the patents at stake covered capturing, storing, organizing and sharing digital images, but didn’t specify whether the sale would include the one at issue in the Apple and RIM lawsuits.

Kodak now acknowledges the image-previewing patent is up for sale, as well as patents that Kodak is litigating against Shutterfly Inc. The move makes clear Kodak’s eagerness to raise cash after two straight quarters in which patent litigation income dried up, contributing to losses.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Nonetheless, a Korean company called Anymode was offering just such a “Smart Case,” that folded up like Apple’s Smart Cover and came in various colors, like the Cupertino case. Although the product was not made by Samsung, it did feature a “designed for Samsung Mobile” logo. And, Apple site 9to5mac said it is told Anymode is run by a nephew of Samsung’s chairman.

Asked for comment, Samsung says that the inclusion of the logo on the Smart Case was an “oversight” and said the product is being yanked from the market.

“As a general practice, Samsung Electronics reviews and approves all accessories produced by partners before they are given the ‘designed for Samsung Mobile’ mark,” a representative told AllThingsD. “In this case, approval was not given to Anymode for the accessory to feature this official designation.”

Samsung said the product had yet to be sold. “We are working with Anymode to address this oversight and the product has already been removed from the Anymode sales website,” the representative said.

For those who may have missed it, Apple is suing Samsung in various forums, calling the company a “copyist” that has incorporated Apple know-how into everything from the design of their products to the way they are packaged. Samsung has fired back with charges of their own and both companies have taken their dispute to the U.S. International Trade Commission as well.

On Friday, the ITC, which has the power to ban the importation of goods into the States, ruled that HTC infringed two of the four patents (originally 10) Apple asserted against it: 5,946,647 and 6,343,263. The first describes a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer,” the second a “real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data.” According to the ITC, HTC has infringed claims 1, 8, 15 and 19 of the ’647 patent and 1, 2, 24 and 29 of the ’263 patent.

Notably, at least one — the so-called ’647 patent — appears to be related to Android, which would effectively make today’s ruling the first to find that Google’s mobile OS infringes on another’s patents. “They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android,” says IP expert Florian Mueller. “It’s telling that those two patents are also at issue between Apple and Motorola.”

So obviously, a blow to HTC and potentially to Android as well. If HTC violated ’647, it’s conceivable that other Android manufacturers have as well. That said, it’s important to note that this ruling is still subject to review by the full six-member ITC commission, so it’s far too early to declare a victor. And HTC has already vowed to appeal the determination.

“HTC will vigorously fight these 2 remaining patents through an appeal before the ITC Commissioners who make the final decision,” HTC general counsel Grace Lei said in a statement. “We are highly confident we have a strong case for the ITC appeals process and are fully prepared to defend ourselves using all means possible.”

Google, for its part, doesn’t seem too worried about the ruling. “We’re pleased that the ITC ruled against all of Apple’s operating system patent claims,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We are confident the Commission will ultimately agree with the ITC staff’s finding that HTC does not violate any of Apple’s patents. Litigation that attacks open-source products limits consumer choice, hurts the economy, and discourages innovation.”

Over the weekend, the group issued a call for prior art invalidating two Apple patents — #7,743,336, which describes a widget security system, and application #20070101146, which covers “safe distribution and use of content.”

The W3C had hoped Apple would grant it a royalty-free license for that IP so it could be included in its Widget Access Request Policy specification for Web apps, but evidently Cupertino is reticent to do so. This is problematic for the W3C, because the Apple patents at issue here are essential to that specification. According to W3C rules, standards must be royalty-free and unencumbered by patents.

In other words, it can’t adopt the Widget Access Request Policy specification unless Apple gives up some of its rights to those patents. And at this point, the company has no plans to do so. It’s not entirely clear why, but presumably Apple feels they’ll come in handy at some point in the future, perhaps in litigating some current or future lawsuits.

So the W3C really has no other recourse than to attempt to invalidate Apple’s IP or give up on the standard entirely. Said intellectual property activist Florian Mueller, “In this case, the W3C hopes to do away with Apple’s relevant patent and patent application. It’s an unpleasant situation for the W3C to have to confront one of its members, especially such a large and powerful one, but sometimes this can’t be avoided.”

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued a split ruling today on Kodak’s suit charging that Apple’s iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry violate its patent on an image-preview function in smartphones. The commission did some upholding, some modifying and some clarifying (mostly not helpful to Kodak’s cause) and ultimately sent the preliminary findings back to the administrative law judge for further review. The commission’s new target date is Aug. 30 — unless the judge sees the need for more time.

Kodak looked for the brightest spot it could find in the news and expressed continued confidence. After-hours investors, not so much.

The deal will settle all patent litigation between the two companies, Nokia said, and both companies will withdraw their complaints before the International Trade Commission. Specific terms weren’t disclosed.

“We are very pleased to have Apple join the growing number of Nokia licensees,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement. “This settlement demonstrates Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”

Although Nokia didn’t say how much Apple will pay in either royalties or in its one-time payment, Nokia did say the settlement should improve the quarterly outlook the company gave as part of its May 31 earnings warning.

As part of the deal, the two sides are licensing some, but not all of each other’s patents. Nokia first sued Apple in 2009 over fundamental cellphone technology patents and the two companies have since been filing legal actions against one another in legal venues across the globe.

Apple confirmed the settlement in a statement to AllThingsD.

“Apple and Nokia have agreed to drop all of our current lawsuits and enter into a license covering some of each others’ patents, but not the majority of the innovations that make the iPhone unique,” the company said. “We’re glad to put this behind us and get back to focusing on our respective businesses.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Nokia Sues Apple
• Did Nokia Sue Apple Before Apple Could Sue Nokia?
• Nokia’s New Focus Is Mobile Services? Sure It’s Not Lawsuits Against Apple?
• Apple Countersues Nokia for Copying iPhone (Plus Disputed Patents and Full Text of Counterclaim)
• ITC Investigating Nokia Over Apple Patent Complaints and Vice Versa
• Nokia Accuses Apple of “Legal Alchemy.” Stops Short of “Chymistry” and “Heresy.”
• Apple Vs. Nokia: The Battle of Britain
• Apple Vs. Nokia: The Battle of Britain II
• ITC: Apple Did Not Infringe Nokia Patents

Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuits that the patent holding company has brought against seven iOS developers, a move that could add significant legal heft to their defense.

Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the motion explains that developers who’ve been targeted by Lodsys “are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and … lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple’s rights under its license agreement.”

So Apple would like to intervene on their behalf.

“While the Developers will likely be interested in resolving this case as quickly and inexpensively as possible, Apple’s interest is in protecting its broader license rights with respect to thousands of App developers for Apple products who may be the subject of future Lodsys lawsuits or threats.”

In other words, Lodsys, which has been harassing independent developers who lack the means to fend off its litigation, may soon find itself grappling with Apple legal, which is an ugly, ugly proposition indeed.

The situation reminds me of a scene midway through “A Bronx Tale” in which a group of bikers disrespect a local Mafia don’s bar (video below). When asked to leave, they refuse. The don walks over to the door, locks it — trapping the bikers inside, turns to them and says, “Now, youse can’t leave.” A group of heavies emerges from the back of the bar and beats the bikers senseless, while this narration runs in the background.

“I will never forget the look on their faces. All eight of them. Their faces dropped. All their courage and strength was drained right from their bodies. They had a reputation for breaking up bars, but they knew that instant, they’d made a fatal mistake. This time they walked into the wrong bar.”

If the court grants Apple’s motion to intervene, Lodsys may have just done the same.