Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Jury orders Microsoft to pay $388 million over anti-piracy patent  —  A Rhode Island jury has ordered Microsoft to pay $388 million in damages for infringing on an anti-piracy patent owned by Uniloc, a company that makes software that ensures licensing rights and security.

David / TmoNews:
T-mobile Market Research Hints to “Sapphire” Naming?!  —  Via a very lucky T-mobile customer who was selected at random to participate in a market survey from T-mobile, our tipster was able to take some snapshots of possible names for the codenamed: “Sapphire/Magic/Dream.”

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
A.P. Exec Doesn’t Know It Has A YouTube Channel: Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos  —  Here is another great moment in A.P. history.  In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness.

Nicholas Kolakowski / eWeek:
Oracle Offering Gadget Wizard for Google Apps  —  Oracle announced the release of Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps.  In addition, Oracle Sibel CRM applications can now interact securely with the Google cloud platform through Google Secure Data Connector, allowing multi-tenancy support for accessing corporate data behind firewalls.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Apple building 5-6 million new iPhones - Analyst  —  Adding his voice to the drumbeat of speculation about Apple’s (AAPL) future iPhone plans, Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu weighed in early Wednesday with a new report from his supply chain and industry sources.  —  Among his findings:  — Two out of […]

Greg Sandoval / CNET News:
Techmeme founder: WSJ, NYT are aggregators  —  Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a “parasite” or “tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet.”  —  The Web site aggregates links to stories.

David Chartier / Ars Technica:
Variable pricing spreads to Amazon, Lala, Rhapsody, Wal-Mart  —  At Macworld Expo in January 2009, Apple announced that it had negotiated a deal that would allow it to join the rest of the digital music distribution industry by removing DRM from all 10 million songs in its download catalog.

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Facebook Blocks All Pirate Bay Links  —  It was less than two weeks ago when The Pirate Bay implemented a new feature making it easier for site users to post links to torrents on their Facebook profile, so their friends can download those torrents with just a single click.

Matthew Dolan / Wall Street Journal:
Ford Takes Online Gamble With New Fiesta  —  Auto Maker to Loan 100 Young People a Car; They’ll Post Videos Over Which Ford Has No Control  —  Auto makers must boost fuel economy under new government regulations, and a sure way to do that is promote small cars.

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Mobile Socializing: Limbo Merges With Brightkite And Announces $9 Million Funding Round  —  In the nascent world of mobile social networking, there are the big dogs (Facebook and MySpace) and everyone who wants to be a big dog.  Two of the puppies just got bigger.