Bad news for you drama fiends out there: if you were looking forward to a protracted courtroom battle between Apple and the Beatles (complete with surprise witnesses, Perry Mason moments, and gasps from the spectators that elicit a round of irate gavel-banging and the judge shouting "one more outburst like that and I'll clear this courtroom"-- man, we love that!), you may just have to let go of the dream. We're not naïve or anything, here; we never expected the case to go all the way to a judge's ruling, but we'd still hoped for some legal fireworks to entertain us all before either side decided it had enough leverage to wrangle a settlement. Take "Redmond Justice," for instance: the Microsoft antitrust case gave us all tons of fun courtroom hijinks over the course of years and years before it all ended with a fizzle of a settlement that was the worst series finale since... well, either Seinfeld or The X-Files. Don't make us have to choose.

But word has it that the Apple vs. Apple lawsuit may zotz out long before it even gets off the ground. Faithful viewer mrmgraphics noted a MacMinute article reporting that, according to Variety, a settlement "could be imminent," which, of course, would spoil all the fun. Sheesh, can't these guys think about the fans for once? Honestly, what are we supposed to watch instead? Wife Swap?

Oh, but hang on just a second, here, Mavis-- maybe there's some world-class angst to be extracted from this whole scheduling mess after all. See, Variety not only says that a settlement is just around the corner, but also states that it will "massively dwarf" the settlement that Apple paid the last time the Beatles' lawyers came scuttling around for a handout. The figure back then in 1991 was a whopping $26.5 million, and that was just for shipping Macs with speakers and line-in and -out ports, so, yeah, we imagine that Apple (our Apple) may be on the hook for a slightly larger sum now that it really is in the music business, what with iPods, iTunes, GarageBand, Logic, etc. So how much do you suppose Apple might have to carve out of its $5 billion cash wad?

Well, this is where it gets interesting, folks, because one lawyer reportedly told Variety that "people are expecting this to be the biggest settlement anywhere in legal history, outside of a class action suit. The numbers could be mind-boggling." Truth be told, we haven't a clue what the current single largest non-class action settlement is (the largest class action one is probably that $200 billion tobacco industry one from a few years back). All we know is that Apple can't be keen to win its spot on top of that particular heap. And we can't imagine Wall Street will be too thrilled about it, either.

That is, assuming it's true in the first place. We eventually got sick enough of the whole "whoops, it's been a little over a decade, time to extort some more cash from Cupertino" routine that the Beatles appear to have adopted and we went looking for the original agreement wherein Apple paid for the use of the trademark in the first place. Eventually we found the salient bits in a UK court judgment from last April when Apple was trying to get the case moved from London to its home turf. Check it out if you're interested, but be warned: legalese abounds. (We're still bleeding from the ears, here.)

If you dare, pay particular attention to Definitions 2 and 3 (which set out each company's "field of use") and Rights To Use Trade Marks 3. From what we gather, Apple Computer's field of use includes "data transmission services" and "broadcasting services" (which ought to cover the iTunes Music Store) and "the parties acknowledge that certain goods and services within the Apple Computer Field of Use are capable of delivering content within the Apple Corps Field of Use," in which case Apple Computer is apparently in the clear "provided it shall not use or authorize others to use the Apple Computer Marks on or in connection with physical media delivering pre-recorded content." Like we said before, what physical media? Apple has yet to ship a music CD.

So we're a little skeptical that Apple is preparing to pay more money than any company in history to settle a case for which, it seems to us, it has a pretty solid case to argue. But hey, don't ask us-- ask a lawyer. We're just the ones killing time until The Venture Bros.