As the titanic copyright battle between Oracle and Google continues at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Google is hoping for a shot in the arm from amicus briefs filed last week by a parade of computer scientists, law professors, and application developers.

After helping to secure last month's historic gay marriage rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court, and while juggling several other high-profile cases, Ted Olson is now leading a challenge to the terms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's $188 billion government bailout.

A start-up that blames Best Buy for its demise got some revenge on Thursday, when jurors returned a verdict that the big-box retailer misappropriated trade secrets from Techforward, a software company that helped retailers offer "buyback plans" for consumer electronics. The jury awarded Techforward $22 million in damages, and a judge tacked on $5 million in punitive damages.

After getting sued for patent infringement by a non-practicing entity called Oasis Research, EMC could have settled, like most of its co-defendants. Instead, the company filed an appeal with the Federal Circuit and won a ruling that limits the ability of patentholders to name multiple defendants in the same complaint. Now EMC is heading back to the Federal Circuit, seeking a ruling that could ease the way for more cases to be transferred out of the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas.

The America Invents Act clamped down on the kinds of multi-defendant patent infringement suits favored by "trolls," but plenty of such cases are still pending. Now, thanks to a win Friday by lawyers at Orrick and Gibson Dunn, defendants may be able to split the cases into much more manageable bites, in friendlier jurisdictions.