Spring has arrived and lawsuits are pushing their hardy green shoots through the soil everywhere we look. It started last week when we reported that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount and the Writers Guild of America. Then we learned that Discovery Communications was suing Amazon for patent infringement over the Kindle (“Did Jeff Overlook U.S. Patent Number 7,298,851?”). Today it’s a Swiss company called Monec Holding Ltd. and the target is Apple. Did Steve Jobs overlook patent No. 6,335,678? According to an Apple Insider report by Katie Marsal, he may have. She writes:

In a 7-page complaint filed with a Virginia district court Monday, Berne, Switzerland-based Monec Holding Ltd accuses the iPhone maker of patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled “Electronic device, preferably an electronic book.”

Monec claims Apple’s distribution of e-book applications violates an early patent filed by the Swiss firm. “Although Monec does not identify the specific eBook reading applications that prompted its lawsuit,” writes Marsal, “the complaint was filed just weeks after Apple began distributing Amazon.com’s Kindle eBook reader software through the App Store.”

Monec’s website is unadorned, uninformative, unimaginative and uninteractive but if anyone reading this finds himself in the vicinity of Galgenfeldweg 18 in Berne, Switzerland we’ll be most interested to know what their office looks like and how many people work in it.

It’s easy to dismiss the actions against Amazon and Apple as nuisance lawsuits but they must be taken seriously. Pundits who brushed off the patent infringement suit brought by a firm called NTP Inc. against BlackBerry vendor Research In Motion Ltd. stopped laughing after the court awarded NTP more than $53 million in damages.

Actually, if anyone has grounds for a lawsuit it’s science fiction novelist Ben Bova, author of a novel entitled Cyberbooks. He published it in 1989, long before e-books were a gleam in the eyes of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Here’s the summary: “A futuristic satire on the fate of the publishing industry after the invention of ‘cyberbooks’, electronic books which eliminate the need for paper, printers, salesmen, distributors and even booksellers.” Unfortunately, Bova didn’t patent the gadget but wouldn’t you imagine that one of the parties in these lawsuits owes him a generous tip for his foresighted concept?

In any event we’ll be at ringside watching Amazon and Apple wrestling with their tormentors.

RC