Whoa, Nelly; after crawling through the desert of a Mac news drought, there's nothing more refreshing than a healthy dose of good ol' litigation to slake one's thirst for drama. Sadly, Apple Legal's latest clash pales in comparison to some of its classic conflicts, like all those iMac knockoff lawsuits or the time it sued the unnamed "Worker Bee" for trade secret violation. In fact, this time the company is playing defense, which is typically less exciting from an Apple-watcher's perspective-- and this particular case certainly isn't as thrilling as when, for instance, Imatec wanted a billion dollars for alleged patent infringement in ColorSync. Still, given how little is shaking in the Mac world, we're happy to glom onto every little bit of drama we can find... and there's at least one interesting twist in this case that tickles our fancy.

Here's the deal: according to a MacCentral article, Pitney Bowes (the company best known to the average shmoe as "the guys that make that automatic postage meter thing I abuse at work when the boss isn't looking") has filed suit against a whole slew of companies for supposedly infringing its "272 patent," and Apple is one of the accused-- along with several alleged partners in crime including Xerox, Lexmark, Panasonic, NEC, and others. This mysterious "272 patent" reportedly "describes a method for altering the dot size used to produce characters on a printed page," which is why all of the companies named in the suit are laser printer manufacturers.

Wait, did we say "are"? We meant "were." Here's the plot twist: Apple's inclusion in this suit is particularly vexing, because Pitney Bowes claims that the LaserWriter is the offending product-- and Apple hasn't sold the LaserWriter (or, indeed, any printer) for years, now. Unless Pitney Bowes can back up its vague claim that "other Apple products might have infringed the patent as well," Apple's going to be fighting a lawsuit based purely on whether or not it infringed a patent in a product it no longer sells. When informed of this development, we're just hoping that Pitney Bowes doesn't come after the owners, instead; our ancient LaserWriter IINT keeps cranking out the pages like a champ, but if we have to put a pack of lawyers on retainer just to hold onto it, we're going to be begging in the streets with signs that say "WILL WORK FOR TONER CARTRIDGES."

Pitney Bowes is hoping to "negotiate a settlement" with each of the defendants, presumably in the form of a licensing fee to keep cranking out printers just as they've always done. (Hewlett Packard apparently lobbed $400 million at PB in an earlier "patent 272" suit to get the lawyers off its back.) That may be a reasonable course of action for most of those companies, who still make printers and thus have an existing business to protect; what about Apple? Somehow we just don't see Steve spending a few hundred million bucks to license technology used in products that he himself nuked from the product list three years back. We expect Apple Legal to get a good workout fighting this one.