A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit. TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users' activities on the site. The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. CNET News

Millions of new mobile phones containing certain Qualcomm semiconductors could be barred from import into the United States under a ruling issued by a federal government agency in a patent dispute. United States International Trade Commission ruled that Qualcomm had infringed on a key patent belonging to Broadcom, a competing chip company that is used in the design of chips made for advanced 3G, or third-generation, smart cellphones. The New York Times

The Bush administration wants to reform the nation's patent system by requiring better information from inventors and allowing public scrutiny of applications, according to the director of the government's patent office. The goal, said Jon W. Dudas, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is to improve the quality of patents, which should curb the rising wave of patent disputes and lawsuits. CNET News

The Federation Francaise de Tennis and Ligue de Football Professionnel, as well as New York-based Cherry Lane Music Publishing, have joined a class-action lawsuit that accuses YouTube and parent company Google of copyright violations. The suit was initially filed last month on behalf of the lead plaintiffs in the case: Bourne, a music publishing company and the Premier League, England's most prestigious soccer league. CNET News

Politicians threatened to enact new laws if universities don't do more to prevent their students from unlawfully swapping music, movies and other copyrighted files on campus networks. At the latest in what has become a multiyear series of hearings focused on university campus piracy, members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Science and Technology Committee said college administrators must seriously consider using not only educational campaigns but also technological filters to reduce illicit file swapping among students. CNET News

Oracle amended its lawsuit against SAP alleging its rival copied its software and support materials to the point of repeating minor errors it had in the original versions. Oracle, which in March filed a lawsuit against SAP and its wholly owned subsidiary TomorrowNow, alleges TomorrowNow copied and stored its proprietary software and support materials when accessing its system. CNET News

The Free Software Foundation released the final draft of an updated General Public License, a draft that prohibits future deals similar to the Microsoft-Novell patent pact but lets that one go ahead. The Novell-Microsoft deal, in which Microsoft agreed to sell coupons for Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server and not to sue buyers for patent infringement, raised the foundation's ire when the companies announced it in November 2006. CNET News