Apple is involved in some curious patent cases filed this week in Texas federal district courts. One suit claims that Apple's iTunes Store (among many others) infringes on a patent for what is essentially an online store for music downloads. Another lawsuit claims that Safari, DVD Player, Front Row, and even Mac OS X itself infringe on a number of patents related to adjustable length displays of textual and other data.

The first lawsuit, filed in the patent-friendly Eastern District of Texas, comes from Sharing Sound LLC, which holds the rights to a patent for "distribution of musical products by a web site vendor over the internet." The patent in question describes what is functionally any website you've ever visited to buy a music download, including song previews, a shopping cart, and even an accompanying app to play legally purchased music. The patent targeting Apple has a provision that downloaded songs have a unique identifier included in the file to link the files to a particular purchaser.

Sharing Sound says that Apple's iTunes Store infringes on this patent. While iTunes must be used to access the iTunes Store, it does so through a custom WebKit view that accesses pages that are built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Though iTunes Plus tracks no longer use DRM, they do contain information in the file to identify the original purchaser, including the Apple ID.

Sony and its various subsidiaries, Rhapsody, Napster, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, and Microsoft are also named as codefendants. If anyone seems conspicuously absent from that list, namely Amazon (for its Amazon MP3 Store), don't be alarmed; Sharing Sound has filed a similar patent lawsuit against Amazon, Netflix, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, and GameStop that cites a slightly different, but identically titled patent that doesn't specify including a unique key in the downloaded files. If either of these suits are decided in Sharing Sound's favor, it could have far-reaching effects on digital music distribution for the next decade. But the patent may be too broad to be enforced.

Patent MONKEYshines

In another lawsuit, this time coming from the Western District of Texas, interaction design firm MONKEYmedia claims that certain features of Mac OS X and Safari infringe on the company's patents related to "non-salience deemphasis." This is a rather obtuse term for "cutting out the unimportant parts."

MONKEYmedia founder Eric Gould is named as the inventor on three similar patents, all titled "Computer user interface with non-salience deemphasis." The patents describe methods for displaying varying amounts of a particular piece of data based on a user control. As the user adjusts to show smaller amounts of data, the "non-salient" bits are "deemphasized"; in other words, only the most important parts of the data are shown.

MONKEYmedia claims that Safari's RSS feed reading features infringe these patents with its adjustable slider for controlling how much of an article is shown in the feed display. This control can show full articles, or variably shorter summaries, using an algorithm that can summarize an article's content. Similarly, the lawsuit targets Mac OS X's built-in "Summarize" service, which applies the same algorithm to any text in any Cocoa-based application.

The lawsuit suggests that DVD Player and Front Row, included in Mac OS X, also violate a particular claim (claim 6 of patent 6,335,730) related to showing objects which represent a "summary" of video data. It's not clear what parts of these apps infringe, though it may refer to either chapter markers or possibly frames used to scrub through a video stream. In either case, it seems this particular claim could also apply to nearly every DVD player, streaming video player, or nonlinear video editing software.