This week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will announce plans to start an investigation into the questionable practices employed by patent trolls, according to a New York Times report. The investigation will be announced at a conference headed up by FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez.

Patent trolls have one more thing to worry about today as President Obama focuses his attention on curtailing their questionable legal activities with a new plan that includes five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations.

This TechDirt article details a Microsoft patent application related to the Xbox One console that might give you a little pause. The patent, "Awards and achievements across TV ecosystem," uses (what we assume is) the Kinect camera and sensors to tell whether a person is watching an advertisement.

The International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled on Thursday that Microsoft did not infringe upon any of Motorola Mobility's patents related to its Xbox 360 console. This latest decision from the ITC puts an end to an investigation that stretches as far back as 2010.

Back in March La Quadrature du Net (a non-profit association defending the rights and freedoms of citizens on the Internet) joined 47 European and International organizations in asking the European Parliament to exclude provisions related to patents, copyright, trademarks, data protection, geographical indications, or other forms of so-called intellectual property from the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA).

The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. has sided with Nintendo in a patent lawsuit filed by Motiva LLC in 2008 alleging that the Wii console infringed on technology that facilitated "a system to track player position and movement." In its ruling the court gave the plaintiff a scathing rebuke while rejecting its appeal, noting that litigation was "Motiva's only activity that could be related to commercializing the technology."

According to a report in the UK newspaper The Guardian - citing data from a recent Microsoft survey - as much as £30.9 million in purchases a month are made by children without their parents' consent. That is according to 28 percent of 2,000 parents surveyed in the region.

This week the European Commission issued a preliminary antitrust ruling against Google’s Motorola Mobility related to its heavy handed tactics against Apple in German Courts. The finding could ultimately lead to a large fine for Motorola (and by extension Google) and could lead to Motorola being forced to enter an agreement with competitors to license its patents for a reasonable royalty rate.

The Federal District Court in Seattle, Washington has given Google's Motorola Mobility a slap in the face, ruling that its FRAND patent fees collected from Microsoft to be worth only about $1.8 million a year. The court said that the H.264 video standard and the 802.11 wireless standard patents weren't worth the $4 billion Motorola was seeking to collect.

Lodsys, a company that seems to specialize only in filing patent infringement lawsuits, has added a number of new video game industry targets in the mobile games space. According to Ars Technica, Gameloft, Gamevil, BackFlip Studios, Pocket Gems and The Walt Disney Company are now named defendants for violating a patent the company holds related to technology used for in-app purchasing.

On Friday the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) finally and formally dismissed a case brought forward by Google's Motorola Mobility unit that alleged that Microsoft's Xbox 360 violated a handful of its patents. ITC Judge David Shaw issued the ruling on Friday, dismissing the last of the five patent disputes. The verdict is still subject to a review by the ITC, and Google retains the right to appeal the decision if it so chooses.

Nintendo has lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Tomita Technologies and has been ordered to pay $30.2 million. The patent relates to glasses-free 3D displays, which Sejiro Tomita claims Nintendo used to develop its 3DS hand-held after a 2003 meeting with the plaintiff where he introduced his technology to engineers within the company. Nintendo has been ordered to pay $30.2 million in damages to Tomita Technologies after a jury found that the company infringed on a patent for glasses-free 3D displays.

Mojang is working on a new service called Minecraft Realms, which it hopes will give those players interested in subscribing their own special little corner of the Minecraft universe.

Apparently Apple has filed a patent application that would allow them to - get this - develop a system that would allow the resale and transfer of "used" digital goods. The new patent application published by the USPTO shows how Apple might be able to enable users to resell or lend digital content they’ve purchased in the past. The patent accounts for transfers that can take place either through the original content provider’s store or directly between users. The method described would also allow for transfers of content that is stored in the cloud.

It looks like Apple has just gotten its hand slapped away from Samsung's cookie jar - according to a report this morning on AllThingsD. Judge Lucy Koh, the judge overseeing the Apple-Samsung patent trial threw out part of the billion dollar verdict Apple had previously won in the long-running case and ordered a new trial to determine damages for patent infringement.

Nintendo is the target of a patent infringement case that claims its use of 3D technology in the 3DS violates the patents held by 58-year-old inventor Seijiro Tomita. Opening arguments in the case began today, according to Destructoid. Tomita claims that he presented his glasses-free 3D technology to seven Nintendo officials at their Kyoto headquarters in 2003. At the time, claims Tomita, he was looking for licensing partners as he awaited his patent application to be approved.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the Internet community to let their elected representatives in Washington D.C. know that they support H.R. 845, better known as the SHIELD Act (check it out here (PDF)). What is the SHIELD Act? "SHIELD" stands for "Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes."

A patent filed for in 2011 by Sony Computer Entertainment America (and unearthed last week by web site Dark Zero) uses load times to determine if software being loaded into a system is legitimate or pirated.

The patent, "BENCHMARK MEASUREMENT FOR LEGITIMATE DUPLICATION VALIDATION," is described as follows in the patent application:

At a hearing yesterday US District Judge Lucy Koh told Apple and Samsung that both sides need to limit their cases to 25 patent claims each, and no more than 25 allegedly infringing products could be listed. Judge Koh threatened to put the whole case on hold unless both sides narrow the case down and accused them of overbroad accusations.

"As this case as it is currently framed, I'm refusing to go forward," Koh said.

Just take your best shots," Koh said. "I don't want a lot of sausage filler."

Google’s Motorola Mobility division was dealt a serious blow in its ongoing legal battle with Microsoft over patents after a judge ruled that 13 of the patent claims it had asserted against the Windows and Xbox maker were not valid.

As expected, Google has backed off of its International Trade Commission complaint against Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, which uses one of its video compression patents. The company had sought to stop the sale of the system in the United States while Microsoft and its subsidiary Motorola duked it out in court over royalty payments related to FRAND patents. But earlier in the week the Federal Trade Commission stepped into the fight, ordering Google to take a more reasonable approach to "essential patents."

On Friday after the Federal Trade Commission issued an order on Google's Motorola patents and how the subsidiary needed to stop charging high royalties on FRAND patents it holds, Microsoft went into action.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a Consent Order (PDF) this week forbidding Google from charging a lot of money for certain critical patents it gained when it bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in May 2012. This is good news for both Apple and Microsoft, but particularly for Microsoft because (according to Microsoft) Motorola Mobility wanted to charge $4 billion a year in royalties for patents Motorola holds on Wi-Fi and video technology.

A patent application unearthed by a NeoGAF forum post and picked up by Kotaku reveals that Sony has plans to implement a technology to deal with the use of used games on more than one console.

A new patent secured by Intel hopes to make using motion controller-based peripherals a bit safer to use. The patent, United States Patent 8333661 - a "Gaming System with Safety Features," won approval with the United States Patent and Trademark Office earlier this month. What's interesting about the patent is that Intel isn't developing its own gaming system (at least not to anyone's knowledge), which means that this patent is meant to augment existing systems likely owned by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

A jury has ruled in favor of MobileMedia and against Apple in a patent lawsuit involving the iPhone. The jury came to the conclusion that Apple's iPhone infringes on three U.S. patents and some claims of the '068, '075, and '078 patents. The '068 and '075 U.S. patents cover "rejecting incoming calls" and call-processing techniques - or how these functions are communicated wirelessly between base stations and landline telecommunications networks. The U.S. '078 patent relates to changeable keys. The judge overseeing the jury trial, U.S.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has received $500,000 in funding from Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus "Notch" Persson and serial entrepreneur (and Dallas Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban. Both donated $250,00 each to help the advocacy group fight for patent reform in Washington, according to GII. Cuban is also a star on the popular ABC television show "Shark Tank."

Following yesterday's ruling by U.S District Judge Lucy Koh that rejected Apple's motion for a ban on the sale of three older Samsung devices still being sold in the U.S. that infringed on the company's iPhone-related patents, Samsung has decided to withdraw all of its requests for injunctions against Apple products currently pending in European courts.

Yesterday afternoon U.S District Judge Lucy Koh rejected a request by Apple to ban the sale of three older Samsung devices that a San Jose Jury determined were infringing on technology patents that were central to Apple's iPhone. Back in August of this year, that jury ruled in favor of Apple and awarded the company a $1.05 billion judgment against Samsung, who it concluded had infringed several of Apple’s patents in creating 26 products – three of which are still being sold in the United States.

Level-5 CEO Hiroshi Akihiro Hino has responded to Sega's recent lawsuit, denying that the Professor Layton and Dragon Quest developer infringed on Sega's patents and called for the lawsuit to be dismissed. Hino made his statement on the Level-5 Japanese web site.