While we appreciate the drama that Apple's legal department kicks our way by filing the occasional lawsuit against an iMac cloner or issuing cease and desist orders to software developers who "borrow" the Aqua look and feel, personally, we always find our courtroom drama more exciting when Apple's playing defense. For instance, who will ever forget the ColorSync Saga? While we're glad that Apple eventually won (and in such a wonderfully entertaining manner), we admit that we miss the billion-dollar Sword of Damocles hanging over Apple's head-- not to mention the comic antics of plaintiff Imatec and its press-release-spouting "CEO" Hanoch Shalit.

Well, pine no more-- those of you who demanded further costly patent infringement litigation against Apple solely for the sake of your own enjoyment, your wish has been granted! As faithful viewer Mr. Vapor kindly disclosed, CNET is reporting that Apple is now the target of a lawsuit by some company called "Elonex IP Holdings," who alleges that our favorite Mac-makers violated Elonex patents in the design of some of its monitors. Elonex claims to have patented certain technologies "for reducing the power consumption of monitors when they're not in use." Basically, whenever your Apple display kicks into power-save mode, the bigwigs up at Elonex start hearing little cash register "ka-ching!" sounds.

This time around, though, Apple's sharing the pain; Elonex's suit actually names twenty-one other defendants, including Compaq and Gateway-- and probably any other company with relatively deep pockets that's shipped an energy-saving monitor in the past few years. And this is interesting: the problem appears to be that the twenty-two monitor-makers were simply using standards set forth by the Video Electronics Standards Association, and while Elonex claims that VESA adopted its patents without permission, VESA itself "has not been named in the suit." Is anyone else picking up on a decidedly Imatec-flavored scent, here?

Well, maybe not; apparently Elonex has sued companies for this exact thing before, and settled the cases to its satisfaction. And several big monitor companies like Samsung and Hitachi have also recently agreed to license Elonex's technology, so this suit appears to have a whole lot more merit than Hanoch Shalit's "hey, wouldn't it be cool if Apple gave me some money?" venture. (Plus, we're going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that, unlike Imatec, Elonex wasn't busted for the illegal sale of stock.) While the article doesn't mention how much Elonex is trying to get, we bet it's a lot more reasonable than Imatec's $1.1 billion-- which is sort of a shame, because this case just doesn't have the same ooomph as the last one. Oh, well... they can't all be gems.