Apple’s Litigious SWORD and 2 More Top Tech Stories on Saturday

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is granted a preliminary injunction by United States Distric Judge Lucy Koh, on domestic sales of Samsung’s (SSNLF.PK) Galaxy Nexus phone, which AAPL co-developed with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). An Apple patent covering unified voice and text search was the basis for the injunction, and just two days before this ruling, another preliminary injunction was granted on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. In the meantime, William Blair reports that the Galaxy Nexus has been Verizon’s number 3 phone in June.

EA (NASDAQ:EA) executive Frank Gibeau says that his company is seeking ways to offer subscription services for other titles, and announces a $50 per year premium service for Battlefield 3, adding that EA already offers a $25 per year service for EA Sports games. Observers feel that this aggressive subscription drive is reasonable, given recent disappointing sales figures for console games, an has some logic to it. Already, Activision (NASDAQ:ATVI) boasts more than 2 million subscription for the paid version of its Call of Duty Elite service.

Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) reports in an internal memo leaked to Kara Swisher, that its general counsel Mike Callahan has stepped down. Callahan was a prime mover in the company’s patent suit against Facebook, which the new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn is now attempting to resolve. Whether the counsel’s exit might portend an AOL-type patent sale by Yahoo remains uncertain for the present.