IBM on Friday announced that it inked a deal with Twitter in December that saw the social network acquire over 900 of its patents. The companies also entered into a cross-licensing deal on patents, though details on that agreement weren't announced.

Twitter's patent purchase could help the company defend itself against future patent infringement lawsuits.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Northern District of California, alleges that the defendants posted links on a Blogger or Facebook page where “unauthorized copies of the performance can be downloaded.”

The court did issue a summons to the two people, Dan Chodera and Karina Jindrova, who reside in France and the Czech Republic respectively. Given their residency abroad, it may take some time for the defendants to be served.

At an AMC theater in Easton Mall in Columbus, Ohio, one Google Glass Explorer went to see Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, but got a rude awakening instead. An hour into the movie he was approached by a federal agent who, without hesitation, snatched the Google Glass off the man’s face and removed him from the theater.

The authorities eventually let the man go, but not without hours of intimidation and a frightening story that has him shaking – literally – even a day after the event. A Movie Association representative compensated the Glass Explorer with 2 free movie tickets for his night of troubles.

A man has received an extra four months in jail after he failed to reveal the password for a USB stick the police and GCHQ were unable to crack.

He received additional time inside for not providing assistance on the US password, which he eventually revealed as “$ur4ht4ub4h8″, which related to a chapter in the Koran.

MPHJ had become one of the poster children for extreme patent trolls abusing the system, and various states had begun suing the company for threatening local businesses. In fact, just today, NY apparently settled with MPHJ -- and revealed that MPHJ acquired its five patents for... $1.

MPHJ argues that it has a first amendment right to shake down companies for money. It's going to have a very difficult time supporting that argument. It seems unlikely that MPHJ's case will get very far.

On Monday, Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley filed suit against Facebook with the Northern District Court of California. The men accuse Facebook of scanning private messages with URLs in them "for purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling." The suit asserts that this practice is a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

"Representing to users that the content of Facebook messages is 'private' creates an especially profitable opportunity for Facebook, because users who believe they are communicating on a service free from surveillance are likely to reveal facts about themselves that they would not reveal had they known the content was being monitored," the plaintiffs said in their complaint.

France-based telecom firm Orange has revealed plans to take legal action against the US National Security Agency (NSA) for using its submarine cable for surveillance.

An Orange spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying: "We will take legal action in the next few days because we want to know more about the eventuality that Orange data may have been intercepted.

In October, Rockstar filed patent infringement suits against Google and several of its Android hardware partners, and this week, Google filed a countersuit, arguing that Android does not infringe Rockstar’s patents and that its lawsuits are damaging the Android brand.

Although Rockstar filed its suits in Texas, Google filed the countersuit in San Jose, California, arguing that the case should be moved. Texas has become a hotbed of patent lawsuit activity, due to its friendliness towards litigators, so it’s only natural that Google would want to case relocated.

A wealthy Texan teenager who mowed down and killed four pedestrians while driving drunk has been sentenced to 10 years’ probation at a private rehab centre, rather than 20 years in jail as prosecutors had demanded.

Critics of the lenient sentence are outraged not so much by the sentence itself, as by the defence’s apparently successful argument that 16-year-old Ethan Couch was a victim of “affluenza” – meaning his family is so wealthy, and he so entitled, that he believed his actions would have no consequences.

"In the present case, there is no evidence that the Defendants (or Hotfile’s founders) are 'pirates' or 'thieves,' nor is there evidence that they were 'stealing' or engaged in 'piracy' or 'theft,'" wrote Hotfile lawyers in arguing for the ban.

MPAA lawyers countered that it would be inappropriate and practically impossible to keep the word "piracy" out of the trial.