Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, began 2012 as a Knight, a high honor bestowed upon him, and 984 other people, (see list below) by Queen Elizabeth II.

More specifically, a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or KBE.

A trusted confidant of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Ive is listed on hundreds of Apple patents.

During the holidays, I spent a few days in the great state of Arizona visiting the Grand Canyon. I was awed by the majestic grandeur of the Grand Canyon from when the rays of sunlight first washed over the canyon walls:

to when the last embers of sunlight vanished into the night sky:

But, nothing intrigued me more than the prominent warning decal citing the US Code.

It’s that special time of year, Justia friends, when we look back and share with you the most popular Onward blog posts of 2011.

Here they are:

Can gaming company Zynga successfully obtain trademark rights to all things ending in ville, the French word for a town or village?

Answering that question is a task facing two federal courts.

Before it launched its billion dollar IPO, the San Francisco-based tech company threatened to sue computer game makers for having product names containing the ‘ville’ suffix.

Rather than accede to Zynga’s demands, game makers in West Virginia and Texas preemptively sued Zynga for court declarations that their game names — Blingville and Dungeonville — do not infringe any of the company’s trademark rights.

A new antitrust lawsuit filed on behalf of iPhone users could get rid of Apple’s exclusivity agreements (‘EA’) with AT&T and Verizon.

The class-action lawsuit (below) accuses Apple of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (‘DMCA’) because the EAs do not giving consumers the “absolute legal right to modify their phones to use the network of their carrier of choice.”

If the plaintiffs successfully get a court to let consumers opt-out of carrier EAs, the ripple effect could be be huge. A decision for plaintiffs could potentially affect all carriers and all mobile handsets sold with locked phones with sold with exclusivity agreements in the U.S., regardless of what mobile operating system they use.

Delaware’s Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision allowing an H-P shareholder to take a peek at lawyer Gloria Allred’s letter alleging that her client, former H-P contractor and actress Jodie Fisher, was sexually harassed by the company’s then CEO Mark Hurd.

Citing a lack of trade secrets, as well as proprietary and nonpublic information, the court rejected Hurd’s attempts to keep Fisher’s original harassment allegations in the letter secret (ss the court opinion below).

Forty years after acquiring publishing rights to the award-winning children’s book “Julie of the Wolves” by author Jean Craighead George, HarperCollins is claiming copyright infringement by Open Road, a Manhattan e-book publisher distributing the work electronically via downloads on Amazon.com, Apple, and others e-commerce web sites.

The outcome of the litigation (read the lawsuit below) could be a bellwether for publishing houses that take their time to bring signed authors’ works into the e-publishing game, including ‘Big Six’ publishers like HarperCollins.

Deal sites like Groupon and Living Social make money by offering discounts for products and services to a large pool of web subscribers.

But what happens if the merchandise being offered for sale may be counterfeit, unauthorized versions of authentic merchandise?

If you’re clothing and fashion accessories designer Gotham Licensing Group, you file a trademark infringement lawsuit against a Canadian company doing business as Beyond The Rack (read the complete lawsuit below).

A company holding a patent for a “Safe Transaction Guaranty” on e-commerce Web sites sued Google, alleging patent infringement.

buySAFE, Inc. contends (read the lawsuit below) that Google’s new Trusted Stores program violates its patent for third-party certification and transactional guarantees for Internet retailers.

It’s been a great year for us at Justia, as we hope it has been for all of our Onward readers.  We thought it might be fun to re-cap (not to be confused with RECAP ) some of the various new projects, pages and products we’ve worked on in 2011.

Verdict – In mid-2011, we launched our new legal commentary and analysis web site, Verdict. Each weekday, one of our team of ten columnists provides original and informed analysis of breaking news and developments in the law.  Articles from Verdict this year included John Dean’s look at The Tea Party, Neil Buchanan’s piece on tax cuts for the wealthy, Sherry Colb’s examination of whether strip searches by jail officials are constitutional, and Vik Amar and Alan Brownstein’s analysis of the recent Proposition 8 ruling by the California Supreme Court.  Other great pieces covered a wide variety of topics including immigration, criminal law, civil rights, constitutional law, health care, new technologies, and U.S. politics.