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When a corporation stakes its reputation on the competitive value of its patent portfolio, it can't afford to watch that portfolio go down in flames. Although the novelty of most any patented technological concept perhaps warrants some re-examination, three patents assigned to memory maker Rambus were recently invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a dispute with graphics device maker Nvidia over whether the act of rendering functionality on a single chip is a novel idea or just an obvious improvement.

This morning, both companies announced they've settled all disputes over the remaining, still-valid Rambus patents, with Nvidia being granted a five-year license to the formerly disputed technology. But this Nvidia win will have implications throughout the industry, as the competitive value of nearly all technologies integrated into a single circuit, may have just decreased.

You have to admit, he's getting better at this. Four years ago, in response to numerous public complaints - many of them in court - about its plans to share aggregate user data with third parties, Facebook responded in a flat, dismissive tone that users were given every opportunity to opt out of behavior sharing. So what they don't opt out of is effectively their own problem.

Today's settlement between Facebook and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission effectively ensures that the company can no longer take this specific stance without facing intense U.S. government scrutiny. But in the intervening four years, Facebook has become a veteran of government scrutiny, including from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and throughout Europe. And it has gained a lot more skill at adapting its semantics to strike the right political and often psychological tones.

It will amount to being publicly shamed, and although Oracle gave SAP an escape hatch, it purposely made that hatch too small to crawl though. In a deal announced yesterday, SAP is likely to plead guilty on behalf of its former customer support unit, TomorrowNow (TN), on charges that it stole Oracle's intellectual property in an effort to support Oracle customers who were also TN clients.

The fresh set of charges was, according to multiple press sources, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco yesterday. (A copy of the filing was not yet available at press time.) The sole defendant in this new set of charges is TomorrowNow, shifting the shame over to the SAP subsidiary, although it will still be SAP that is liable for damages.