A San Francisco courtroom is presently the center ring in the worldwide tech IP litigation circus. While other legal battles over mobile device patents and copyrights are as down and dirty as ever in places like Germany, Australia, and elsewhere in the U.S., the fight between Oracle and Google over the alleged theft of Java technologies stands out due to its cast of characters.

IBM researchers are looking to go the distance with electric vehicles. On Friday, Big Blue announced that material innovation developers Asahi Kasei and Central Glass had joined its Battery 500 Project team to develop new battery technology for electric vehicles. IBM Research has been striving to develop a lithium-air battery that would make it possible for a family-sized electric car to drive 500 miles on a single charge.

AT&T could shake up the voice-recognition market when it launches several application programming interfaces for its Watson speech recognition program in June. Developers will be able to use these APIs to create new apps and services with voice recognition and transcription capabilities.

Today in international tech news: Legal battles galore. In the latest go-around between Germany and Google, a German court rules that YouTube is responsible for copyrighted materials uploaded by users. Meanwhile, courts in Europe and Australia address the issue of ISP liability, a website called "Facebox" ticks off you-know-who, and Apple defends itself in a 3G/4G snafu.

The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company. Hulu is a joint venture between investors and television operators: Comcast's NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company. Competitors include Netflix and cable providers like Time Warner Cable.

If you work with SIEM, you've been spending more than a couple of years, dealing with "Big Data" -- more lines of logs than any one person, or even a reasonable-sized team of people, could ever hope to keep up with reading through. Our data is plenty big enough already. So why is everyone so hyped over Big Data now?

Apple will use so-called Liquidmetal for the casing of the iPhone 5, which will be launched in June, according to a report. Liquidmetal is the commercial name of an amorphous metal alloy developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and marketed by a company they set up called Liquidmetal Technologies.

X-ray vision won't just be limited to comic book superheroes in the future. A team at the University of Texas at Dallas led by Kenneth O, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering, has made new scientific advances that could make it possible for cameras to see through solid walls. The researchers have designed a chip that could make it possible for the camera on a mobile device to see through walls, wood, plastic, paper -- and even into the human body.

There is cross-party pressure in the UK to stay the extradition of 23-year-old Richard O'Dwyer, who founded a website that shared links to TV shows. Last month Theresa May, the UK home secretary, approved the extradition request to send O'Dwyer to the U.S., where he faces up to 10 years in prison for copyright violations.

Well the shock had barely worn off from the recent news that Microsoft is among the Linux kernel's biggest contributors when another mind-bending announcement was made on a closely related theme. The development this time? None other than Microsoft's declaration last week that it was creating a wholly owned subsidiary devoted to forging closer ties with the open source community. Is it a dream? A nightmare?