A former Internal Revenue Service employee this week got 105 months in prison for pleading guilty to theft of government property and aggravated identity theft in a case where the guy tried to get away with nearly $8 million in fraudulent tax returns.

A German court has thrown out a Motorola Mobility patent lawsuit against Apple, breaking a recent run of courtroom successes for the company.

A jury in Texas gave the verdict that two patents of Eolas Technologies that enable Internet browsers to host embedded interactive applications were invalid, in a protracted legal battle which involved top Internet companies like Google and Amazon.com.

As patent infringement lawsuits continue to pile up in the mobile industry, Google, Apple and Microsoft appear to be trying individually to reassure regulators and standards bodies that they won't use their patents to build a monopoly, experts said.

The former owner of two Illinois technology companies was sentenced Thursday to serve 30 months in prison for participating in a conspiracy to defraud a U.S. Federal Communications Commission program to help schools and libraries in poor areas connect to the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The founder of several Muslim jihad websites has pleaded guilty to three charges related to making online threats, including threatening the writers of the television show "South Park," the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Google is at odds with Apple, Microsoft and Cisco over the licensing and litigation of patents. While Google wants to make the most of patents it will receive if its acquisition of Motorola is approved, the others want to change the way so-called essential patents are licensed.

The changes Samsung Electronics has made to the Galaxy Tab 10.1N are enough to no longer infringe on Apple's intellectual property rights, a judge at the district court in Düsseldorf, Germany, decided on Thursday.

If there's a poster child for the dangers of spyware, it's Julie Amero.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are getting more negative attention, as major websites such as Wikipedia plan to protest the bills with blackouts on Wednesday. Even Google will join the action, with a link on its homepage explaining why the company opposes the legislation.

Samsung took a step toward finding a kind of "pax tabletica" with arch-foe Apple in an Australian court last week, offering to remove features from its Galaxy Tab to avoid a court ban on sales of the device in that country. But what's really interesting about the case isn't the technical litigation, but the underlying attempt to define how much of a product's design is actually protected under existing, fragmented international laws.

In the aftermath of RSA saying that its SecureID two-factor authentication tokens may have been compromised in a data breach of the company's network, here are some key questions and answers about the situation.

Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.