A jury has awarded communications company VirnetX Holding nearly $106 million after determining Microsoft violated two of its patents.

The verdict came Tuesday after a weeklong trial in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

Lawyers for VirnetX, which is based in Scotts Valley, say the $105.75 million verdict was $71.75 million for infringing one patent, and $34 million for infringing another.

The patents cover ways to establish virtual private network, or VPN, connections, which are used to protect Internet and other data traffic from snoops. The traffic is generally encrypted, or scrambled so outsiders can't decipher it.

Microsoft says it is disappointed by the jury's verdict and that it believes it didn't infringe the patents. It says it will appeal.

Apple on Tuesday asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to block the importation into the country of HTC's Google Android-based mobile phones, including the Google-branded Nexus One.

Apple asked the court for "a permanent exclusion order" that would bar from entry "all mobile communications devices and components" made by HTC that carry the offending technologies, according to court documents.

Apple on Tuesday sued HTC for alleged, multiple patent violations, claiming the Taiwan-based manufacturer's products infringe on its iPhone technology. Apple filed the actions with the ITC and the U.S. District Court for Delaware.

In the ITC filing, Apple says 11 HTC phones violate its patents, including the Nexus One, Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Pure, Imagio, and myTouch 3G. Apple claims HTC infringed on a total of 20 patents governing a range of technologies.

Apple wants the ITC to block HTC and its partners from "importing, marketing, advertising, demonstrating, warehousing inventory for distribution, distributing, offering for sale" any of the listed phones.

Apple is also seeking unspecified monetary damages in the Delaware court.

After further review, the U.S. Patent and Trademark review board's decision stands.

A federal appeals court rejected South Carolina's petition to use the letters "USC" on the Fighting Gamecocks baseball team's uniforms. The decision upholds the Patent and Trademark Office board's ruling regarding the University of Southern California's claim to the logo.

Scott Edelman, an attorney representing USC, -- the LA USC -- said the ruling protects the school's "primary athletic mark." He said the logo, used on team clothing and equipment, brings in significant revenue.

Nobody would confuse a Trojan for a Gamecock, but he said people might mistake South Carolina merchandise for Trojan merchandise if the garnet-and-black of South Carolina and the cardinal-and-gold of Southern California both carried the same "USC" logo.

Microsoft on Friday mounted a last-ditch effort to get a U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling in a long-running patent infringement case involving its Word software.
Last month, the court denied Microsoft's appeal of an injunction in the case involving Toronto-based firm i4i, which last year won a $200 million court case against Microsoft pertaining to technology built into Word 2007 and Office 2007 that's used to customize XML code. That figure has since grown to $290 million in interest and fines levied by judge on the grounds of "intentional infringement."

The i4i patent describes a way to manipulate the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformation, by removing dependency on document-encoding technology.

After last month's ruling, Microsoft said it would remove the disputed feature from new copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007 and have them ready for sale in time for the court ordered Jan. 11 deadline. Nonetheless, Microsoft has insisted all along that it's not guilty of infringement and is taking one last stab at getting the judge to see things its way.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a $290 million judgment against Microsoft Corp. and issued an injunction that will prevent the sale of its popular Word software.

The court injunction is set to go into effect Jan. 11. Microsoft has said such a bar would prohibit the sale of all currently available versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office.

Microsoft had appealed a Texas jury verdict in favor of i4i Inc., a Toronto company. The jury found recent versions of Microsoft Word infringed on a software patent.

Microsoft has said that it and the public will both suffer if Word goes off the market while the company devises a workaround. The court said the decision does not affect copies of the programs sold before the injunction goes into effect, so Microsoft can still provide technical support to the old versions even if they infringe on the patent. .

Should techniques for training horses be eligible for a patent? What about a system for choosing a jury or fail-proof method for speed dating?

Supreme Court justices raised the questions Monday as they struggled to decide what types of inventions should qualify for patent protection.

In a case that has put software and bioscience companies on edge, the justices debated whether processes or methods of doing business should be eligible for protection. The dispute has raised serious questions about whether software programs, medical procedures, financial transactions and other nontangible inventions should be able to obtain patents like those granted to physical devices. And it left the high court grappling with the line between abstract processes and concrete applications.

Monday's oral arguments made clear that the justices are skeptical that the business method at the center of the case before them — a process of hedging weather-related risk in energy prices — deserves a patent. Some saw a risk in using the current case to set broad precedent on what can and cannot be patented.

The court's newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor, asked the lawyer defending the hedging application how the high court can limit patent protection to "something that is reasonable?"

In 1997, inventors Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw applied for a patent on a process that can be used by residential and commercial customers to lock in fixed energy bills, even during an unusually cold winter. The Patent Office concluded the process was too abstract and denied the application.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the Patent Office decision last year and said a process is eligible for a patent only if it is "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" or if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." The circuit court said Bilski's process did not meet that test.

The question before the Supreme Court on Monday was whether the "machine-or-transformation" test is the right standard.

Michael Jakes, the attorney representing Bilski and Warsaw, told the high court that the test is too "rigid and narrow" and would exclude too many useful innovations in today's information-based economy, including his clients' hedging technique.

Red Hat has filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to uphold a lower court's ruling that software isn't patentable. Red Hat is not a direct party but took a position against software patents in the case of Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw versus David Kappos, Undersecretary of Commerce and director of the U.S. Patent Office. The case is now before the Supreme Court. Rob Tiller, an assistant general counsel at Red Hat, filed the brief in what he said was a rare chance to attack the patent issue head-on.

"Our patent system is supposed to foster innovation, but for open source and software in general, it does the opposite," said Tiller today in a statement announcing the amicus brief.

"Software patents form a minefield that slows and discourages software innovation. The Bilski case presents a great opportunity for the Supreme Court to rectify this problem," he said.

Tiller argued that a federal Circuit Court ignored Supreme Court guidance when it decided in 1994 that someone who could show that software was "useful" and produced "a concrete and tangible result" could patent the software. Before that, the Supreme Court and lower courts had held that abstractions couldn't be patented and that a patent needed to cover an abstraction incorporated into a particular machine, or be a process that "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing," Tiller wrote.

The Supreme Court should rule in favor of Bilski and Warsaw and allow only patents that cover tangible machines and processes, the amicus brief says.