By Josh Halliday February 28, 2011
European customs officers have been ordered to seize shipments of Playstation 3s after LG won a preliminary injunction against Sony in an acrimonious patent battle between the two Asian electronics giants. 
The ruling by the civil court of justice in the Hague means that all new PS3s have to be confiscated as they are imported into the UK and the rest of Europe for at least 10 days. If the injunction was extended it could mean consoles disappearing from high street shelves. It is understood that Sony and computer games retailers typically have about two to three weeks' worth of PS3s in stock across the continent. Tens of thousands of PS3s were seized by customs officers last week in the Netherlands, the Guardian has learnt, in a dispute that centres on Sony's allegedly infringing use of Blu-ray technology belonging to LG. Sony, which imports around 100,000 of the consoles a week, is frantically trying to get the ban lifted. The Japanese company has the right to appeal to the European patents office. LG meanwhile, could apply to the same patents office to get the 10-day import ban extended. Alternatively, the Korean company could apply for a court order to get the consoles destroyed but it is highly unlikely the court would grant a request to eliminate the warehoused goods. LG argues that Sony PS3s infringe a number of its patents relating to playback of Blu-ray Discs. LG called for an investigation into the PS3's Blu-ray use in a filing with the US international trade commission earlier this month, and said it sought a "permanent exclusion order … excluding entry into the United States" of the games console. If Sony is found to have infringed LG patents, it could be forced to compensate the South Korean manufacturer for each PS3 it has sold around the world, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Read more here –>guardian.co.uk
The court found Apple liable for both accidental and willful infringement on three patents owned by Mirror Worlds, which the court found forms the fundamental premise of technologies like Apple's Cover Flow, which displays the cover art of MP3 files in a wave of album art. For each patent, the jury found Apple liable for $208.5 million, according to documents filed in the case. The three patents, filed by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter, cover a "Document Stream Operating System," where documents are stored in "one or more chronologically ordered streams". Apple, however, filed an emergency motion to stay the verdict, based its belief that it did not infringe on two of the patents. According to a transcript of the court case provided in Apple's filing, the presiding judge in the case, Judge Leonard Davis, apparently had his doubts as whether Apple directly infringed the Mirror Worlds patents. "But I think it's a tricky legal issue as to whether you're right that there's enough evidence there to support a direct infringement under those claims, or whether they're right that there has to be — that there is not enough evidence regarding use of those products," Judge Davis said..jpg)
The lawsuit concerned the GeForce 8600M, the short-lived graphics processor with an unfortunate tendency to overheat. The settlement marks the end of a long and bumpy road for Nvidia, which first acknowledged the problem back in July 2008. In a statement then, the company said the defect was due to “weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products,” and agreed to set aside between $150 and $200 million to pay for “anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement, and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP (multi-chip package) products used in notebook systems.” 
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