The removal only applies to Apple’s online store, however. People wishing to purchase one of the devices in question can still get them from any retailer that sells Apple products, including the Apple store. It is unclear whether Motorola plans to attempt applying the December ruling to physical sales of Apple’s devices. That ruling stated that those devices violated patents held by Motorola in Europe relating to 3G technology.

The second victory comes in the form of a permanent injunction against Apple’s iCloud service in Germany. That ruling was handed down by a German court today. At issue in this case the iCloud feature that pushes email notifications to users’ devices instantly, rather than waiting for the device to check the email server. Apple is apparently in the process of modifying iCloud to remove the infringing functionality. While most of iCloud’s services will still function normally, users will have to set their devices to fetch email periodically.

I sent a request for comment to Apple, but have not yet received a response. This represents Apple’s first significant loss in any of its myriad patent battles. The company’s ongoing battle with Samsung has gone largely in Apple’s favor in Germany, where the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has been banned for some time, despite Samsung’s appeals. In fact, the ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung in Europe has prompted the European Commission to investigate Samsung for using its patents anti-competitively. You can bet that Apple will be appealing this ruling as soon as possible.

This agreement expands upon a previous agreement between the two companies, and is one of ten similar deals with other Android and Chrome OS device makers. Other licensees include HTS, Acer, and Samsung. With the inclusion of LG, Microsoft now has licensing agreements covering 70% of all Android-based phones sold in the United States.

While the terms and details of the agreement have not been disclosed, the deal presumably allows LG to use technologies covered by Microsoft’s patents in their Android and Chrome OS devices for a fee. Microsoft’s intellectual property licensing program was begun in 2003. Since then Microsoft has been party to over 1,100 agreements.

[Source: Microsoft Press Release]

Elan, a tech company that focuses on touchscreen technology, sued Apple in 2009 for violation of two of the company’s patents. In June of last year, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that Apple had not violated any American laws.

Settling this suit lightens Apple’s legal load by only a small amount. The company is currently embroiled in a number of patent infringement actions with Samsung, HTC, and others. Samsung is accused of copying Apple’s phone and tablet designs in its Galaxy line. HTC, meanwhile, was just on the losing side of a ruling by the ITC, which held that the smartphone manufacturer had violated one of Apple’s patents.

[Source: Taiwan News]

Now, however, it looks like Apple may be looking to get into the facial recognition business too. Today the US Patent Office published a patent application (PDF) filed by Apple in June 2010 for “Low Threshold Face Recognition.” The application covers “[m]ethods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs” to provide “reasonably effective (low threshold) face recognition.” While images from the application appear to focus on the technology’s use in iOS devices, it could certainly be adapted for Apple’s computers as well.

A flow chart also included in the application shows the process by which the technology will recognize users’ faces. The software will check a number of factors, including skin tone, and perform a simple comparison with stored profile photos.

Normally Apple’s patent applications, though noteworthy, should not be used for speculation about upcoming products in the short-term. For example, on Tuesday we ran a story about a patent application Apple filed covering fuel cell technology in mobile devices. Normally such applications only mean that Apple is exploring a certain kind of technology, and that we should not expect to see it any time soon, if at all. This case might – just might – be a little different, however. For one thing, Apple filed this application eighteen months ago, which means that the concept has been on the company’s radar for even longer. Also, there’s the presence of the technology on the Galaxy Nexus. Now that the Android operating system has the capability, you can expect to see it cropping up on new Android-based phones as quickly as their manufacturers can crank them out. That being the case, it is at least possible that we will see some sort of face recognition technology in next year’s iPhone.

Now, that is still speculation – this is just a patent application, after all. But it is a particularly interesting bit of news.

Over the last few years, battery technology has emerged as the major limiting factor in the advance of smartphone technology. Apple’s iPhone has been constantly plagued by reports of poor battery life, going all the way back to the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 4S pays for its more advanced technology – namely Siri and its faster processor – with a surprisingly short battery life. Apple is rumored to have a software fix in the works – iOS 5.1 is expected to help with battery issues – but there is only so much a software fix can do. The smartphone industry is in desperate need of a breakthrough in battery technology. Apple’s fuel cell technology may be just such a breakthrough.

The limitations imposed by current battery technology is mostly exclusive to smartphones. Apple’s notebooks – the MacBook Pro and MackBook Air – and the iPad tablet have all been largely immune to the kinds of battery life complaints leveled at the iPhone. The issue is one of size: the smaller a battery gets, the less power it will hold. The more technology Apple and other manufacturers try to cram into the shell of a smartphone, the smaller the battery becomes, and consequently the lower the battery life. Conversely, a battery that satisfied users’ power demands would increase the size and weight of the device, which would in turn lead to user complaints that the phone was too bulky. Fuel cells would go a long way toward solving this dilemma.

It is worth noting, however, that this is only a patent application. Apple has filed countless such applications as it has explored various technologies over the years, and not all of them have panned out. At present, all this means is that Apple is exploring the possibility of using fuel cell technology in their devices. So, don’t expect next year’s iPhone to suddenly be sporting fuel cells in place of traditional batteries. Indeed, we may never see fuel cells in Apple devices. But then again, we know that Apple is at least exploring the technology, so don’t be surprised if in a couple years Apple announces a phone that you only have to charge once a week, instead of once a day.

[Hat Tip: Mashable]

The patent in question deals, in a nutshell, with the way a phone scans displayed content for certain kinds of data and offers the user the ability to take certain actions related to that data. In other words, when your Sprint Evo 4G or your Verizon Droid Incredible detects a phone number or an email address on a web page and creates a hyperlink allowing you to call that number or send an email to that address, it infringes Apple’s patent.

The ITC’s “limited exclusion” is only a ban on importing the offending devices, rather than a total ban on their sale. Those that are already in the US can continue to be sold. Moreover, the ban does not go into effect until April 19, 2012, with an exception allowing the import of refurbished phones for warranty services until December 2013.

Requests for comment to Apple and Google have not yet been answered, and HTC could not be reached. However the company spoke to Financial Times early this morning and claimed that the ruling was actually a victory for them. While the ITC found infringement against one of Apple’s patents, Apple had originally sued over ten patents. Moreover, the infringing element is a a small feature of the user interface, which HTC said they plan to remove soon.

[Hat Tip: The Verge]

What do you think Google needs to do to be successful in social? Let us know.

In fact, new CEO Larry Page reportedly told Googlers that 25 percent of their bonuses would be tied directly to the success of a social strategy. From this, I think it’s safe to say that social is very important to Google.

With these recent events in mind, a patent filing from Google that shows social features seems significant. Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea first reported this news and suggested that it could be a clue into what Google’s social network could look like. He brought up some interesting points about the patent, including the fact that it resembles Twitter.

The screenshots seem to indicate a mobile interface that would consolidate various social platforms. Slawski told us that he believes Google will try to pull in its own products such as Latitude, My Maps, Gmail, and its +1 Button into the “social hub.”

“It’s a chance for Google to draw together a lot of things that they’ve been working separately and independently. It gives them a chance to put some ads on there, and it might have a lot of potential,” he said.

On the +1 Button, specifically, Slawski said he could see it being used as both a social function and also as a ranking signal for Google.

“I think Google would like to use +1 Button on their own rather than say, number of tweets or number of Facebook ‘Likes’, – it’s their own data and they have control over it that way,” he pointed out.

The screenshots also show, what appears to be, a Facebook icon. While it could simply be a placeholder, it is interesting that Google would include Facebook, especially since the two are widely known as competitors. Slawski told us that he could see Google including Facebook but that he could also see them not including it.

“They’re going to try to weave everything into it that they can that seems to make sense,” he said.

Although Google has had a rocky past with social, does this “social hub” offer potential to its future social endeavors?

Google climbed past a morass of ineffective search engines when it arrived on the Internet. Its devotion to the most relevant possible solution for a given query quickly made it the de facto search choice as millions of people shifted their browsing habits from walled garden content to the broader World Wide Web.

The essential and much-discussed PageRank technology holds a patent, a common legal protection sought by software developers small and large. Some have claimed software patents affect far too broad a scope of potential innovation, leading to lawsuits where a patent owner claims damages by multiple companies.

Those on the losing end of such suits end up paying for what they argue are obvious and non-original concepts. That could change with a shift in the way the USPTO looks at software patents, the Patently-O blog on patent law said.

A series of cases may remake the software industry, all the way to the top where Google and other companies reside:

In the most recent of these three (cases)—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they "result in a physical transformation of an article" or are "tied to a particular machine."

Patently-O sees Google’s PageRank, the patent for which is owned by Stanford University, as failing the first part of the test, as generating scores isn’t a physical transformation. The second part proves troubling given recent decisions made by the USPTO in a couple of other cases, not only for PageRank but other Google patents too.

"Google might have thought that the patent system would surely protect new technological developments that are highly creative and socially valuable. The PTO’s new position proves that view mistaken," Patently-O said.

Oh this could be fun.

George Washington University law professor John Duffy discovered, and confirmed with several colleagues, the appointment of US patent judges by the director of the USPTO, and not the Secretary of Commerce, goes against the law. Per the New York Times:

Some provisions of the Constitution are open to interpretation, but some are clear. The Constitution says, for instance, that some government officials may be appointed only by the president, the courts or “heads of departments” like the attorney general or the secretary of commerce.

But a 1999 law changed the way administrative patent judges are appointed, substituting the director of the Patent and Trademark Office for the secretary of commerce. Jennifer Rankin Byrne, a spokeswoman for the office, said 46 of the 74 judges on the patent court, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, were appointed under the new law.

“That method of appointment is almost certainly unconstitutional,” Professor Duffy wrote in his paper, first published last summer on an influential patent law blog.

Two possible arguments against Duffy’s discovery appearing in the report appear to fail the basic tests a court would require to assert the validity of decisions by patent judges since March 2000.

One company with an $86 million stake in this fight may be the harbinger of numerous other cases. Imagine if Microsoft, Apple, or Google is caught up in this situation, just to give three examples. If years of cases need to be retried, the Patent Office could end up backlogged for a long time remedying the problem.

Plenty of people watch videos online, but successfully making money from their viewing habits continues to prove a challenge. Even Google and its top online destination, YouTube, may not be receiving the results they desire.

They will know who opted to skate over advertising in the video, to a certain extent. A Google patent application about targeted video advertising answers the long-time question, did someone actually watch an ad or not?

“The method includes transmitting a promotional item for display on a video terminal, determining whether the promotional item was skipped, and updating a profile corresponding to the promotional item or a viewer of the promotional item based on whether or not the promotional item was skipped,” reads the abstract of the application.

Further into the application, the patent shows how the technology will respond to ad skippers. The skipping contributes to a profile of the viewer, with skips updating what the back-end advertising server knows about the demographics of the person.

Someone routinely skipping a category of ads of no interest to them should mean they will stop seeing those less relevant commercials in favor of more suitable ones. From the application details:

The characteristics tracked by the video delivery system 100 may include, for example, a product or service type (e.g., a so-called vertical) being promoted (e.g., car, personal care product, pharmaceutical, insurance, investments, etc.), a genre or style of the advertising materials (e.g., informative, romantic, comedic, off-beat, action-packed, etc.), the visual impression of the item (e.g., bright/dark, loud/soft, high/low-energy, etc.), and/or other relevant attributes.

Relevance goes beyond how much a product or service might be of use to a particular person. If someone doesn’t skip particular ads, perhaps they always watch the humorous ones for example, Google’s system could figure this out for future ad presentations.

As Google continues to build out its video ad options, this looks like a key selling point as they work with cable companies that provide set-top boxes and digital video recorders to their customers. People love using their DVRs to skip ads, but doing so will give Google a little more information about the viewer than they realize.