New Lawsuit Against Microsoft & The Others

Between Christmas and the New Year's night, things should be peaceful in most areas of the world, especially for all those software and hardware companies that just got through the "Holiday shopping madness," but this time, things are a bit different, at least for Microsoft, Apple, and Google. As strange as it may seem, these three companies got a really nasty Christmas present - a lawsuit!

The story is veeeery simple, yet stunning - Cygnus System accused all those three giants of violating US patent 7,346,850, entitled "System and method for iconic software environment management." Good, but... what about that patent?

Well, if you want to know a bit more, it's enough to say this is all about thumbnails. The patent mentioned earlier describes "a method and system for storing, navigating, and accessing files within an operating system through the use of a graphical thumbnail representing the video display of the active document within the active application," so it can easily cover software like Windows Explorer, Cover Flow, and even iPhone's file previews capability. Obviously, it doesn't stop here, since Safari's browser tab thumbnails and Google's Chrome similar capabilities are also targeted!

This may be only the first step in a legal storm that can engulf other giants of the industry, like Adobe, Opera, maybe going as far as targeting web services like Flickr, but that's what remains to be seen. After all, there's still plenty of time until this story will get to an end...