This past August former HP CEO Mark Hurd stepped down from the company after he was caught sending a sexual harassment letter. Hurd had a personal relationship with contractor Jodie Fisher, who had worked at HP as a greeter and hostess at company events. Hurd currently works at Oracle Corporation as a co-president and Meg Whitman has replaced him at Hewlett Packard. AllThingsD got their hands on the letter that attorney Gloria Allred wrote to Hurd on behalf of Jodie Fisher. I have embedded the letter below.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has rejected Oracle’s patent claims against Google. On December 20th, the U.S. Patent office issued a rejection in the reexamination of Oracle’s U.S. Patent number 6,192,476. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had rejected 17 out of the 21 claims about the patent in discussion including 7 of the patent’s independent claims. Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google in 2010 over patents and copyright infringement within Java over the Android operating system.

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) has announced the acquisition of RightNow for $43 per share (about $1.5 billion). Oracle will be integrating RightNow’s cloud-based customer service offering to their own Public Cloud solutions. The acquisition price is a 20% premium on its closing price on Friday, October 21.

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) believes that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) owes them $1.16 billion in damages for copyright and patent infringement of Java software used in the Android operating system.

This graphic from Thomson Reuters shows just who is suing whom in our current patent wars.

There are a couple of internal documents circulating around the Internet that was not intended to be leaked. The document is known as the “Lindholm Draft” and it features a Google engineer discussing how the Google founders wanted the company to seek technical alternatives to Java for the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome browser. Another document that leaked is by Android founder Andy Rubin.

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) has acquired call center software company InQuira. Call centers use InQuira software to help their call center agents provide customer service. InQuira customers include 3M, Sprint Nextel, Yahoo!, and Bayer. This is Oracle’s way of effectively competing against Salesforce.com in the call center space. [Reuters]

Earler this year Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) filed a lawsuit against Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Oracle holds the patents to Java after they acquired Sun Microsystems. However former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a blog post in 2007 praising Google for integrating Java into Android. Oracle deleted the blog post, but Google retrieved it using Amazon.com’s Internet Archive and Wayback Machine. Google is using the deleted blog post as an estoppel. [Groklaw]