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Samsung's move to drop all requests for injunctions against Apple in Europe may not be enough to escape sanctions from the European Commission over the alleged abuse of its standards essential patents. EC Vice President Joaquín Almunia said during a press conference on Thursday in Brussels that his office will continue with its investigation against Samsung and will release a "statement of objections" within the coming weeks.

Back in 2010, we wrote about a report suggesting that Intellectual Ventures was using somewhere around 1000 shell companies to hide many of its patent shakedown attempts. For years, IV itself liked to say that it wasn't involved in any patent litigation directly (that changed not so long ago), but we had seen some IV patents showing up from some small patent trolls, where it was impossible to determine who actually controlled the patent or the lawsuits. However, at times, other companies have argued that the shell lawsuits were really IV in disguise.

A few months ago, we wrote about an attempt to crowdfund an investigation into all of IV's shell companies. While that attempt to raise money did not reach its goal, it has helped put renewed attention on IV's use of a massive number of shell companies. In response, IV has been trying very hard to play down the whole thing. It published a ridiculous blog post arguing that the use of thousands of shell companies is just a normal business procedure:

People have radically different views of the patent system. Critics see it as an unmitigated disaster, while many in the patent bar don't understand what all the fuss is about. But it's rare for prominent advocates of these contrasting perspectives to engage each other directly.

But that happened on Wednesday in a teleconference debate hosted by the Federalist Society. Defending the status quo was Judge Paul Michel. Until 2010, Michel was the chief judge of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, a post that made him the nation's top patent judge. He debated Judge Richard Posner, a Chicago-area appeals court judge who threw out a patent lawsuit between Apple and Motorola earlier this year, complaining that the patent system had descended into "chaos."

This isn't a final decision by the USPTO. Apple will get to respond before any patents are truly killed off, and reexams are generally a long, dragged-out process. However, it is notable that all three of the utility patents Apple used to win its case are now having their validity seriously questioned.

Intellectual Ventures is at it again -- playing the "oh, little innocent us? we're not doing anything that should really concern anyone" card in the press. Wired is running an op-ed by Raymond Hegarty, IV's "VP Of Global Licensing in Europe." He's a long term patent maximalist... and it shows. The article is entitled: Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like Us, which should give you an idea of the fanciful rewriting of history you're about to read.

The main target of derision among IP Attaches? NGOs, or non-governmental organizations -- who are normally focused on pesky things like the well-being of the public. But, according to the IP Attaches, these darn NGOs and their do-gooding is getting in the way of them getting to spread their Hollywood and US Chamber of Commerce-backed maximalist propaganda: Karin Ferriter, the IP attache to the World Trade Organization, had particularly sharp words for non-governmental organisations operating in Geneva, where she said there a “number of people working to undermine IP.”

After spending almost three weeks this summer arguing to a jury that Samsung had persistently copied its products, Apple won a stunning $1.05 billion patent and trademark verdict. But after that win—which, if it holds up, will be the largest patent verdict in history—Apple continued to pursue a even bigger prize. It sought a court-ordered injunction that would kick Samsung phones off the market altogether.

Now it's clear, that's not in the cards. In an order [PDF] issued Monday, US District Court Judge Lucy Koh said that while Apple had established that "design, as a general matter, is important to consumers more broadly," it hasn't proven that infringement of its design patents caused "irreparable harm."

In a separate order [PDF], Koh put to rest Samsung's wish for a new trial because of alleged misconduct by the jury foreman, Velvin Hogan.

Ikey is the author of the Linux Distro, SolusOS. Solus has caused quite a stir even in its infancy. Born from the immense dislike for Gnome 3 and Unity, Ikey has set his goals on creating a distro that uses Gnome 3 technology with full backwards compatibility with GTK2. In short, people are getting their old Gnome 2 Desktop back, with some great added function.

It's not been an easy feat, but Ikey forges ahead because people like his work. A lot of people. Thousands use his work....some of them on mission-critical work stations and servers. It's just that good.

But the whole thing almost went up in smoke 24 hours ago. No, I mean really up in smoke.

We've obviously been highly critical of Intellectual Ventures over the years, as the company is doing tremendous harm to the innovation world by effectively setting up tollbooths and legal threats that take money away from actual innovation and funnel it into inefficient uses. Recently, we wrote about how another firm, IP Checkups, was planning to unveil Intellectual Ventures' infamous web of shell companies, which it uses to shuffle patents around, to hide who the real beneficial holders of the patents are. In response to this, the Spicy IP blog did interesting interviews with both IP Checkups and with Intellectual Ventures. Intellectual Ventures was represented by Nicholas Gibson, International Marketing Director at the firm. You can read the two interviews, but I just wanted to focus on one of the more ridiculous, and blatantly intellectually dishonest statements of Gibson's. IV management is somewhat infamous for these kinds of things, but they really ought to be called out on their bullshit more frequently.

Recently the agency seems to have backed away from the “search bias” claims that are the major thrust of Google critics’ complaints against the company. The Post article suggests, however, that dissatisfied critics may now take their complaints to the Department of Justice.

DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It's not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.

The Digital Reader brings us the news that Sony, of all companies, is opening its own ebookstore in Germany, bringing with it a large selection of DRM-free books.

In contrast to that -- and what we found most exciting about many of the new companies that had popped up over the last decade or two -- was the rise of middlemen as "enablers." These were situations where the middlemen weren't gatekeepers, and weren't "required" to do what you wanted to do. Instead, they were companies that helped give people/organizations a lift up on what they were trying to do, while keeping them and their work (rather than the middlemen) central to the market. So, when you see things like eBay or Etsy or Kickstarter, those are more enablers (and, yes, they do have some restrictions on use, but they're more policy based, rather than "can you make us money"-based).

For the first time, individuals and companies that do not themselves make anything - commonly known as "patent trolls" - are bringing the majority of U.S. patent lawsuits, according to a study by a California law professor. The sharp increase in this type of lawsuit serves as a milestone likely to exacerbate the tension over patent issues and increase calls for patent reform and scrutiny of the system.

The next big case to pay attention to concerning software patents appears to be the CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. case, which is being reheard "en banc" (by the full slate of judges) at the federal circuit court of appeals (CAFC). The short version of the case is that it involves a patent over the idea of software that conducts a "shadow transaction" to make sure that there are enough funds to complete a real transaction, before allowing the real transaction to go through, thus minimizing "settlement risk" (the risk of the deal not actually being completed). Should that be patentable? Well, that's part of the argument. The district court tossed out the patent as being simply about an "abstract idea," which is not patentable, as abstract ideas are excluded from section 101 of the patent act, which lists out patentable subject matter. On appeal, a divided three judge panel overturned the lower court, and said that when you looked at the invention as a whole, it was patentable subject matter under section 101. The full CAFC has agreed to rehear the case, and the amicus briefs are flowing in, as people realize that this case is the next key battleground over software patents.

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple, has jumped ship from iOS to Android. In an interview with Dan Lyons of ReadWrite, Kawasaki said that he's a diehard Android fan. Kawasaki switched to a phone running Google's mobile operating system about a year ago so that he could use a 4G LTE network. Apple's iPhone 5 supports LTE, but at the time, the latest model, the iPhone 4S, did not.

A computer scientist has uncovered weaknesses in the application verification service Google recently rolled out to help users detect malicious apps on their Android smartphones and tablets. "By introducing this new app verification service in Android 4.2, Google has shown its commitment to continuously improve security on Android," Xuxian Jiang, a professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, wrote in a brief report published Monday. "However, based on our evaluation results, we feel this service is still nascent and there exists room for improvement."

Ubuntu phones and tablets may not be a reality yet, but Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is "close" to running on everything from smartphones to supercomputers.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. have joined forces to offer more than $500 million to buy Eastman Kodak Co. (EKDKQ)’s patents out of bankruptcy, said people familiar with the situation.

The two companies, competing for dominance of the smartphone market, have partnered after leading two separate groups this summer to buy some of Kodak’s 1,100 imaging patents, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.

The Linux-based GPU cluster runs the Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, which allows the graphics cards to function as if they were running on a single desktop computer. ocl-Hashcat Plus, a freely available password-cracking suite optimized for GPU computing, runs on top, allowing the machine to tackle at least 44 other algorithms at near-unprecedented speeds. In addition to brute-force attacks, the cluster can bring that speed to cracks that use a variety of other techniques, including dictionary attacks containing millions of words.

A moment of inattention has allowed the ITU’s proposed deep packet inspection (DPI) standard to escape. The slip-up happened when an Australian CryptoParty activist Asher Wolf put out a public call on Twitter asking for a copy of the text. The ITU duly sent it by e-mail – only later realising its mistake and asking her to treat it as for her eyes only.