And the intellectual property just keeps on piling up; we have to wonder where Apple even keeps it all these days. Surely the shelves are all full, the drawers are overflowing, and the basement is crammed with so much IP it's practically polluting Cupertino's groundwater by now. But environmental concerns be damned, because it's patents Apple wants, and patents Apple gets-- more and more, in an unyielding stream issuing forth from the PTO like some kind of... of... patent-spitting firehose.

Okay, so it's a dumb image. The patents are cool, though. Honestly.

The particular recent patent you might want to consider is U.S. Patent number 6,731,312, which, as faithful viewer Rich points out, apparently covers the user interface of iTunes. We say "apparently" because this freakin' patent makes the tax code seem clear and exciting by comparison: "What is claimed as the invention is a computer readable medium comprising media player application code which implements the following procedures: generating in a user interface an application window having a window frame and a plurality of stiles to define a plurality of panes within said frame; displaying in a first one of said panes a user selectable index of a plurality of media files; displaying in a second one of said panes first selected information for said media files; and displaying in a third one of said panes second selected information for said media files wherein said second and third panes are each initialized with a selection to view all of said user selectable index of the plurality of media files in said first pane." Holy cats, are we dead yet?

Anyway, CNET confirms that, as of last week, Apple has secured a patent on the iTunes interface (note that this is not the same as the iPod interface patent application we mentioned a few weeks back), which ought to give the company a nice layer of protection from the bane of its existence-- namely, other companies swiping its interfaces and then making lots more money off them then Apple ever does. Remember, Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement when Windows came out, and eventually lost big. Patents reportedly offer far greater protection of intellectual property than copyright does, so now Apple's legal department has a much bigger stick with which to swat down those that would seek to capitalize on Apple's research and development.

You know, like those jokers over at Lindows, er, we mean Linspire. Remember when we told you about Lsongs, the iTunes ripoff that practically duplicated every single element of Apple's interface, shifted one row of controls from the top of the screen to the bottom, and then just made the whole thing look as ugly as possible? Well, it sure looks like Apple will now be able to smack 'em down for a licensing fee, and if Linspire doesn't want to pay, it'll just be that much more courtroom drama for the rest of us. And it'd be a fun tussle, too, seeing as Linspire is a veteran of defending itself against none other than Microsoft itself. Bring on the pain!

You know, if we did invent a patent-spitting firehose, we bet we could patent it. Oooh, the irony!