It's been a little while since we've seen a new lawsuit rear its ugly litigious head on our show, but the sue-free zone ends here. Some company named Harris Corp. has filed suit against Apple for canceling the Newton project, in a move marking what we believe to be the first legal fallout from the detonation of the Newton bomb last February. Harris, a Newton licensee whose contract with Apple runs through next June, built its entire business on the prospect of making Newton variations for other companies like Ameritech. The San Jose Mercury News has more details on this latest lawsuit to garnish Apple's legal blue plate special.

This lawsuit isn't a very big one, in terms of money at stake: Harris is asking for at least $17 million in damages because it was a licensee of Newton technology who basically lost its business when Apple relegated the Newton to the dustbin of high-tech. That's nothing compared to that laughable Imatec lawsuit over ColorSync for $1 billion, of course, but the Harris suit actually holds water; they were courted by Apple to become a Newton licensee, their license has not yet expired, but all the business they had assembled around the Newton has been decimated by Apple's formal announcement that it would not develop the technology any further. (If Apple had spun off or sold Newton, things might be different, but as it stands, the technology remains in Apple's hands, who has decided to leave it stagnating on the shelf.)

More than likely, Apple (read: Steve) assumed that suits like this one would arise when Newton got canned, but the cost of paying off a $17 million legal settlement is quite likely considered a small price to pay for refocusing Apple on its core priorities. We're not privy to how much the Newton project was making or losing at the time that Apple finally killed it (after years of batting it around like a cat playing with a terrified field mouse, we might add). The sad truth of the matter is that the Newton could have really taken off if it had been handled right from the beginning; in fact, we still think it's the best handheld technology out there. But instead, it became only a distraction-- one that Apple deems worth paying to go away.