The suit bears a lot of the stamps of hollow patent trollery, from the outside-the-industry plaintiff company to the oddly late filing. (The iPhone has been out for a couple years now, and it's had a camera the whole time.) But these guys aren't bullshitting: they have a history of winning similar suits against major camera maufacturers, including Sony, which paid them $25m in 2001, and Canon, which paid them $34m in damages in 2003. They've entered into licensing agreements with "many" of the companies they've sued, which include the likes of Samsung, Nokia and Nikon. So, what's their secret? Patents like this:
Digital cameras, have you ever heard of them?

To have a patent as fundamental as this—among others, including a patent on digital shutter buttons, and one for storage and display methods for digital images—awarded in the early 90s and upheld by the courts is nothing to scoff at. When this thing finally kicks off—the scheduling conference isn't until January, so it'll probably be a few months before we see fireworks—it'll be one to watch, since companies who land in court with Apple have a tendency to—one sec—DIE HORRIBLY. There. [LoopinSight, specific patent list here]

According to Zhongyi Electronics, Microsoft "only paid to use [their] software for its Windows 95 system." They say that the two fonts weren't even covered in the agreement to begin with. Yikes. Microsoft is appealing the court's decision by claiming that the fonts were in fact covered by the agreement and that there was "legitimate right" to use them. [Obama Pacman]

Based on the press release, the claim is that Barnes & Noble used information, including design details, gained from meetings with Spring Design which were intended to end in a joint product. Apparently the Spring Design camp was caught just a little bit off guard when the Nook announcements started coming out:

Spring Design Files Lawsuit against Barnes & Noble : Nook Violates Alex Intellectual Property

CUPERTINO, CA - November 2, 2009 - Spring Design today filed a lawsuit to protect its Alex™ e-book intellectual property. The lawsuit asserts Barnes & Noble misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties' non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex' features into its recently announced Nook e-book.

"Spring Design unfortunately had to take the appropriate action to protect its intellectual property rights," said Spring Design Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Eric Kmiec. "We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market."

Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble's marketing and technical executives extolled Alex's "innovative" features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.

Alex, with its unique Duet Navigator™, provides the capability for interaction and navigation techniques of the two screens and furthermore utilizes the capabilities of Android to enhance the reader's experience by supporting interactive access to the Internet for references and links. As the first in the market to offer an e-book with full Internet browsing while reading and with easy navigational control via its touch screen, Alex is well-positioned to offer the most dynamic and powerful reading device in the market.

Spring Design is focused at working strategically with book store partners to jointly develop the market and revolutionize e-book with interactive multi-media open Internet access. "It is our desire to resolve this matter so that we can move forward together to expand and grow this e-book market with enriched user experience, bringing readers to a new level of reading enjoyment," said Eric Kmiec.

About Spring Design:
Spring Design, founded in 2006, delivers innovative e-reader solutions and products to the e-book market, offering overall "Link Notes", a content authoring and multi-media publishing tool as add on editions to original text. Spring Design is located in Cupertino, California with engineering offices in Taiwan and China. Spring Design pioneered its patent-pending dual screen design with Duet Navigator™ capability in 2006, and has been working with major book stores, newspapers and publishers over the last two years, sharing the vision and the capabilities of the dual screen device. Spring Design's innovative patented technologies incorporate the seamless interaction of dual display and multi-online access in a single device, benefiting and leveraging the technology and resources of the Web to enhance the reading experience with open Internet access.

She's handed down quite a number of cyberlaw decisions during her career, some of which show the kind of technological awareness that's utterly foreign to our current geriatric court. According to Wired's Threat Level, she's ruled against companies with deliberately hidden or misleading EULAs, limited the powers of the executive to acquire user information and records from ISPs with National Security letters, and widened online publications' rights to resell freelancers' content without additional payment.

There's a catch: her penchant for tech comes from her experience as an intellectual property lawyer, meaning that—though this isn't conclusive—she could tend to side with organizations like the RIAA and MPAA should the court hear any filesharing-related cases during her tenure, which they almost certainly will.

Say what you want about her rulings, but there's something to be said for her being the first nominee to the court with any record in cyberlaw. That "internet" thing is getting to be a pretty big deal, I hear. [Wired]

The cabinet position will give a single point of authority to a job now handled by a scattered handful of different agencies and committees. It also calls for increased strength to prosecute and punish IP offenders. A provision that hoisted the responsibility for civil (in addition to criminal) prosecutions for IP cases on the Justice Dept. had to be thrown out first, as it would have effectively gave the already over-burdened folks at the DoJ the added enjoyment of being the entertainment companies' civil trial lawyers. Also, interestingly, the Bush administration apparently forgot about their earlier weariness to politicize a position (by appointment) so closely related to dealings of the legislative branch and the judiciary—because avoiding that kind of thing has been this administration's hallmark, right?

What it will mean day-to-day for us modern web users remains to be seen, but creating a czar worked so well for the war on drugs, why not try it again? [CNET]

It's not just industry groups like the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition that's quoting them either. Everyone from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Patent and Trademark Office to the FBI will repeat the same numbers back at you, pointing evasively to each other when asked which body funded the extensive economic analysis needed to arrive at such figures.

Ars pointed out that, even without looking for their sources, the numbers don't make much sense. 750,000 would mean 8% of all unemployed people in the U.S. lost their jobs to counterfeiting. $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 domestic revenues of the movie, music, software and video game industries. Yet policies are made from this information every day. [Ars Technica]

We throw around the phrase "intellectual property" commonly, as we bitch about patents, lawsuits and other industry jargon (as we did earlier today in a post about the Wiimote). It's one of those concepts that's tough to grasp because the property itself so often digresses to an idea pissing match between monolithic corporations and lawyer speak. Then you hear about a story like this one. – Mark Wilson

Chicago Gunman Angry Over Patent [sfgate]

"Even though we made it, SCH -B570 with 8GB HDD is not allowed within the company," said Ki-Tae Lee, Samsung Electronics' Telecommunications Network CEO. During the Wireless Broadband Forum in Seoul, President Lee explained the strict prohibition by saying, "8GB storage capacity is more than enough to steal all confidential data about our company."

Many companies are disallowing MP3 players, cellphones and other personal devices in their buildings for the same reason. It's terribly easy to plug in a device and siphon off all the IP (intellectual property) owned by the company.

We're a little more relaxed here at Giz HQ, though. Even a 60GB iPod wouldn't be enough to suck out all the moldy old pictures of us in a hot tub. – Jason Chen

Samsung Bans its 8GB Phone in the Company, says CEO [Telecoms Korea] Thanks, Randy!