Hey, Kids, Lawsuits! Well, okay, make that "lawsuit," singular, but for those of you still mourning the end of that $1.1 billion suit that got slapped against Apple by a rinky-dink outfit called Imatec who claimed that ColorSync infringed its patents, this new bit o' litigation ought to have you grinning like a madman. Granted, so far it lacks one of the Imatec lawsuit's most engaging elements-- namely, the incessant "Hey, look at me, I'm suing Apple! Woo-hooooo!" press releases issued on a twice-hourly basis by one Dr. Hanoch Shalit-- but as faithful viewer Androgen points out, Apple's latest legal challenge definitely bears at least some subtle similarities to the Imatec drama.

Take, for example, the Sketchy Company Factor. According to a Reuters article, Apple has been sued by some entity called BIAX Corp., described as "a small Colorado company owned by a father and son who live in Florida and Colorado, respectively." But the article also notes that "there is no telephone listing for BIAX Corp. at the Boulder, Colorado address listed in the lawsuit, or anywhere else in the U.S., according to the telephone company." On top of that, we were unable to find any mention whatsoever of a "BIAX Corp." in a Google search, and when we finally found BIAX's web site (which does list a phone number, by the way, and not much else), it turns out to be an AOL member site sans non-AOL domain name-- and one that appears to have been put up just two days ago. Geez, Imatec may have been pretty much just Hanoch Shalit and his secretary, and the company may have had zero products and no income, but at least it had the taste to slap together a semi-respectable web presence before trying to squeeze a billion bucks or three out of Apple.

Then there's the Sketchy Patent Issue. Both Imatec and BIAX exist(ed) solely to license intellectual property to other entities. Well, in Imatec's case, you may recall that the court ruled that not only did Apple not infringe on Imatec's patents, but also that those patents didn't belong to Imatec in the first place. Whoops. BIAX's beef with Apple involves two patents dealing with "a computer with instructions that use an address field to select among multiple condition code registers" and "a parallel processor system for processing natural concurrences and method therefore." Don't ask us what exactly that actually means-- our brains click off when confronted with that sort of jargon, though we're guessing Apple's dual-processor Macs are at issue-- but we've been assured by dozens of more technically-minded representatives of the AtAT viewer community that said technologies were used heavily long prior to 1996, when the patents were established.

The big difference between BIAX and Imatec, however, is that while Imatec hogged the press spotlight like some sort of Miss Piggy of the image-processing industry, BIAX is keeping pretty quiet. It was clear from the beginning that Imatec hoped to coerce Apple into a settlement by trying to drag its name through the mud, while also attracting investor capital by publicizing Imatec's potential billion-dollar windfall. BIAX, on the other hand, doesn't even appear to have disclosed to the media just how much cash its hoping to extort from Apple or even which Apple products are allegedly violating its patents. Here's hoping that BIAX is just a little behind with its press kits, the media blitz is just around the corner, and that we'll soon be able to try this case in the media as is our inalienable right. After all, what good is a lawsuit without some public melodrama?