There’s some potentially bad news for Microsoft in Germany; the Mannheim Regional Court has awarded Motorola an injunction that could effectively block all sales of Windows 7 and the Xbox 360 in Germany. The whole case revolves around a pair of patents that Motorola Mobility holds, concerning “adaptive motion compensation” and “adaptive compression of digital video data.” The court found that Microsoft’s Media Player, Internet Explorer, and Xbox 360 all infringe on the patents held by Motorola, and the resulting injunction blocks the distribution of the infringing products and allows Motorola — in theory — to order the destruction of all physical copies of Windows 7 and any Xbox 360s currently for sale in the country. Whether or not the injunction will actually be enforced, however, is another point of contention entirely.

In December of 2010, former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov was convicted of theft of trade secrets when he took some exclusive code out the door with him. This past February however, Aleynikov’s conviction was overturned due to a ruling in 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, the court’s opinion has finally been published and it’s been made clear exactly why this conviction was overturned; code is not a physical object and cannot be stolen. The code was not stolen from Goldman Sachs, only copied. Since Goldman Sachs was not deprived of its use, it wasn’t theft.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has announced in a memo that the dial-up provider come media giant has sold off 800 of its patents to Microsoft for $1.056 billion. The cash deal comes as AOL faces pressure from investors to make good on their promises of a rebirth for the company. Considering that a hefty chunk of that cool billion will be distributed to shareholders, the deal is sure to placate hard feelings for now.

Instead of making other things a certain subset of gamers want really badly, Valve has moved from Portal 2 to DotA 2, a somewhat indirect, somewhat direct sequel to the super popular Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III mod. DotA has spawned various clones, and much like Minecraft — but before that – created a gaming genre. Valve didn’t initially create DotA (though they did hire the mod’s original developer, IceFrog), and while Blizzard also didn’t, they’re taking Valve to court over the trademark because, essentially, as you can probably guess, DotA was a mod on an original Blizzard property.

While Marvel’s mutants carry on a fictional struggle for personal and public acceptance, it seems the issue of whether or not mutants are human is a done deal for Marvel. However, it’s not so much an issue of ethics, but something far, far more compelling: Tax law.

Apple, along with book publishers HarperCollins, Hachette, Mcmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster are now involved in a class-action lawsuit that accuses them of colluding to fix prices in order to hurt Amazon’s Kindle success. The lawsuit, being brought by a Seattle law firm, suggests that all the parties involved had reason to be afraid of Amazon’s pro-consumer pricing scheme for both its hardware and for eBooks.

The logic of the case goes something like this: Publishers were concerned about lost profits from the sale of Amazon’s eBooks, Apple was concerned that the Kindle could seriously damage the iPad’s viability as an eBook reader, and therefore, the two teamed up to fix prices to try and thwart Amazon’s eBook endeavors.

Yesterday, Zynga filled an addendum to its IPO which details its interesting and complicated relationship with Facebook. In short, they’re going to be working very closely for a while. Last summer, Zynga entered into a five-year exclusivity agreement with Facebook and language pertaining to that agreement was present in the original IPO, but it was chiefly concerned with currency dealings, specifically that Zynga agreed to use Facebook currency for its games and agreed to divvy up the profits with Facebook.

This new, massive (600 page) addendum broaches all kinds of other exclusivity concerns and makes it clear that Zynga is ready to work with Facebook for the long haul. According to the addendum, all Zynga games with Facebook support will be Facebook exclusive for the duration of the agreement. This not only affects the games Zynga has already developed, including flagship FarmVille, but will also apply to any further games developed and released on Facebook during the course of the agreement.