We should remind our international viewers that Monday is a holiday here in the U.S.-- Columbus Day, an occasion that we described to you all last year as "a day on which we reflect on the many cultural and technical achievements of the city of Columbus, Ohio." Well, color us embarrassed, but we've since discovered that we were way off base. After a bit of research, we found that the holiday's name has changed slightly over the years, as these things do, and it turns out that Columbus Day was originally "Columbo's Day," a traditional celebration of the legendary TV detective played by Peter Falk. We apologize if our former inaccuracy caused any confusion.

In any case, Monday's a holiday to us Yanks, so we've all got an extra-long weekend with which to celebrate by donning trenchcoats and looking deceptively befuddled. And what better way to lead into the three-day weekend here on AtAT than with the latest word in the Apple vs. Beatles case? After all, Columbo spent his share of time in court, and both Steve Jobs and the scruffy lil' detective popularized the phrase "Just one more thing." (And we hear Sir Paul McCartney does an impeccable impression of the guy.)

Just a few days ago we mentioned that Apple had apparently fired its lawyers on the case, and that appears to be fact. The rumored reasoning behind Apple's change of representation was that Linklaters had been pressuring Apple to settle, and a new Macworld UK report appears to back that up: while one "industry insider" surmises that Apple canned Linklaters because the firm was "inflexible in terms of billing and reports," an anonymous source states that "settlement negotiations began, but as they progressed, both sides began to feel that they were completely in the right." So if Linklaters had actually been pushing Apple to settle for some $36 million and Apple feels it stands a solid chance of winning in court, it's not hard to figure out why Apple has hired Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer instead.

We're certainly not going to claim that we're impartial observers in this tussle (although most of the AtAT staff was raised on a steady diet of Beatles music for years before Apple shipped its first computer, so we've got emotional stakes in both camps), but based on our eyeballing of the terms of the Apple-Beatles agreement, we can certainly understand why Apple reportedly thinks it hasn't violated squat. We're far less able to imagine how the Beatles can look at the same terms and think they've got a slam-dunk win against Apple, since the company hasn't shipped any Apple-branded physical media with music on it. Perhaps the Beatles are planning to argue that shipping Macs with iTunes samples on the hard drives and iLife '04 installation discs with music loops on them puts Apple in the wrong. That'd be a stretch, though, and clearly the impetus of this case was the one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, and frankly, we can't see how those violate the agreement's terms in the slightest.

But hey, it's not for us to decide, and given the apparent "We Shall Prevail" attitude on both sides, it sounds like this case is headed to court where a real judge can rule. Isn't it refreshing to find one of these cases destined for a courtroom battle instead of a fat settlement check and "no admission of wrongdoing"?