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It's no secret to anyone paying attention to the video game industry that the graphics processor war has long been primarily waged between rivals Nvidia and AMD. What you may not realize is just how involved those two companies are with the developers that use their cards and tools. It makes sense, of course, that the two primary players in PC GPUs would want to get involved with game developers to make sure their code is optimized for the systems on which they'll be played. That way, gamers end up with games that run well on the cards in their systems, buy more games, buy more GPUs, and everyone is happy. According to AMD, however, Nvidia is attempting to lock out AMD's ability to get involved with developers who use the Nvidia GameWorks toolset, and the results can already be seen on the hottest game of the season thus far.

The US Supreme Court issued rulings this morning 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.

When Santa Barbara startup FindTheBest (FTB) was sued by a patent troll called Lumen View last year, it vowed to fight back rather than pay up the $50,000 licensing fee Lumen was asking for. Company CEO Kevin O'Connor made it personal, pledging $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle.

Once FindTheBest pursued the case, the company dismantled the troll in short order. In November, the judge invalidated Lumen's patent, finding it was nothing more than a description of computer-oriented "matchmaking." At that point, FindTheBest had spent about $200,000 on its legal fight—not to mention the productivity lost in hundreds of work hours spent by top executives on the lawsuit, and three all-company meetings.

Wednesday's bombshell advisory declaring TrueCrypt unsafe to use touched off a tsunami of comments on Ars, Twitter, and elsewhere. At times, the armchair pundits sounded like characters in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, as they speculated wildly—and contradictorily—about what was behind a notice that left so many more questions than answers. Here are some of the more common theories, along with facts that either support or challenge their accuracy.

As Techdirt noted a couple of years ago, patents have been the bane of the 3D printing world, holding it back for years, possibly decades. Now it looks like patents have reared their ugly head again in this world:

In a stunning display of madness, makerbot industries files a patent application on a mechanism clearly derived from content created by their users. What's almost worse is the article they wrote praising the invention, presumably while they were filing the paperwork.

A Linux Foundation project inspired by the Heartbleed security flaw announced that it will fund a security audit for the OpenSSL code base and the salaries of two full-time developers.

The Heartbleed flaw shone a spotlight on how poorly funded the OpenSSL cryptographic software library is despite being used by many of the world's richest technology companies. The Linux Foundation, with support from those tech companies, created the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to boost the security of OpenSSL and other open source projects in need of help. Today, the foundation announced that the first projects to get funding will be OpenSSL, OpenSSH, and Network Time Protocol.

One of the official webpages for the widely used TrueCrypt encryption program says that development has abruptly ended and warns users of the decade-old tool that it isn't safe to use.

On Tuesday evening, Valve Software used a forum in the Steam games-store app to announce a delay, though for once, it wasn't for an internally developed video game. Instead, the company slapped a "when it's done" sticker on its Steam Machine living-room PC project, which has now been bumped to "a release window of 2015, not 2014."

For many years we've written about the serious problems with CAFC, the court of appeals for the federal circuit, which is better known as the appeals court where all patent cases go. CAFC was created in the early 1980s under the belief that a more "specialized" court could better handle the more complicated technical issues related to patents. But what really happened is that it basically built a club of patent-friendly judges, who spent nearly all of their time with patent lawyers, and thus took an increasingly patent-friendly view of the world.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court smacked down the Federal Circuit (CAFC) for its made up rules that made it almost impossible to enable victims of patent trolls to get the courts to order the trolls to pay legal fees. As the Supreme Court noted, CAFC seemed to set up arbitrary rules for no reasons at all. And this is important, because courts almost never award legal fees, and with the untimely death of patent reform, hopefully this small change will at least help in the meantime.

Bogus copyright claims on YouTube are getting more and more prevalent, but they only get exposure when they do damage to high-profile targets. Michael Tiemann is the Chief of Open Source Affairs at Redhat Inc. and apparently he can't use Creative Commons music in his uploads without being bombarded with copyright claims.

On Wednesday morning, tech sector lobbyists thought they were in the final stages of pushing through a hard-fought compromise on patent reform. "Tuesday night it was moving forward, Wednesday morning it was moving forward," said Julie Samuels, director of Engine, a group that lobbies for startups. "Then I looked at Twitter and there was a tweet saying it was dead. What the hell?"

Last year, consumer search website FindTheBest tried to use an anti-extortion law to fight back against Lumen View Technology, a patent troll that attacked it with a "matchmaking" patent. While FindTheBest was able to knock out Lumen's patent in short order, its lawsuit based on the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act came to an end this week.

Techdirt reader Oldlad stuck this through the Submissions slot recently: Because I will not agree to LG's Privacy Policy, I can now no longer access/use any of of the TV's network based programs: Iplayer, Skype, 3D etc. As of the 7th May following a software update to our less than two year old LG TV. I was confronted with a message asking me to read and agree with a couple of important new documents. So like a good little citizen I read and agreed with the first doc regarding use of said TV. but having read the Privacy Doc I was not best pleased with the companies assumption that I would simply agree to their sharing all our intimate viewing details (plus what ever else they can see)with all and sundry.

As we've pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled "for the encouragement of learning." Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it's frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.

A few days ago, BitTorrent's Chief Content Officer, Matt Mason, posted a plea to Hollywood to get on the net neutrality/open internet bandwagon, pointing out that having a free and open internet is very much in their interest, if they really want new platforms to emerge that give Hollywood more options than just the big players who dominate the space:

As we noted, yesterday's FCC vote concerning the NPRM on "open internet" rules was really just the start of the process. A lot of people seem confused by this -- and part of the problem is really the FCC. Tom Wheeler keeps insisting that the rules are designed to protect net neutrality and the open internet, but as lots of people keep pointing out, the rulemaking he's proposing would likely do the opposite. Because of that, you get a ton of confusion, perhaps best shown by a simple comparison, put together by Drew Oden on Twitter of the summary from both the NY Times and the Washington Post about what happened:

A year ago, we wrote a whole post looking at the copyright questions raised by Canadian astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield, doing a cover version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," along with an astounding music video in space, as he prepared to return to earth. Hadfield, for months, had been a great ambassador for the space program, using a variety of social media to communicate with folks back on the planet about what his day was like. The "Space Oddity" video just cemented his place as a key figure helping to generate interest in the space program through regular public communications with everyone in a very accessible way.

In our post, we noted that while the copyright issues were complicated, thankfully, it didn't really matter "because after a bunch of back and forth negotiations, they got all the permissions they needed directly from David Bowie." Except, as we find out today, that's not fully true.

Following last week's terrible ruling from the appeals court of the Federal Circuit (CAFC), a lot of people have been trying to dig into what this would mean if it stands. As we mentioned, this is far from the end of the line. Google can (and will) seek a reversal, either from the entire CAFC or the Supreme Court. And even if that is rejected or fails, the case still goes back to the district court level to determine the fair use question (which will then see its own series of appeals). In short, this is not even close to being settled yet -- which means many, many, many millions of dollars in legal fees are going to be tossed around before this is settled. That, alone, is a mess for innovators and entrepreneurs who are in a state of flux given the situation.

But, rest assured, if this ruling holds, it will be bad news for innovators. Over a year ago, Sacha Labourey had a good explanation of what's at stake here:

Maintainers of the Linux kernel have patched one of the more serious security bugs to be disclosed in the open source operating system in recent months. The five-year-old code-execution hole leaves computers used in shared Web hosting services particularly vulnerable, so users and administrators should make sure systems are running updated versions that contain a fix.

The memory-corruption vulnerability, which was introduced in version 2.6.31-rc3, released no later than 2009, allows unprivileged users to crash or execute malicious code on vulnerable systems, according to the notes accompanying proof-of-concept code available here. The flaw resides in the n_tty_write function controlling the Linux pseudo tty device.