PIC is reporting on a lawsuit against Palm surrounding the PDF rendering engine used in webOS. San Rafael based Artifex software has brought a suit against Palm Inc. in the U.S. District Court for northern California. The company claims Palm Inc. infringed on its copyright for its PDF rendering engine which is used in webOS.
Artifex is the developer and copyright owner of muPDF, a high-performance PDF rendering engine targeted at mobile devices. The company alleges that Palm improperly integrated muPDF in the Palm Pre’s “PDF viewer” application without Artifex’s authorization and in violation of the GPL.
The muPDF software is available under the GPL or a commercial license. Artifex’s main dispute claims that Palm has not bought a commercial license. The company claims Palm’s own documentation admits including Artifex’s muPDF in Palm’s Pre product as the PDF rendering engine in their PDF viewer application, but Palm neither obtained a commercial license from Artifex nor complied with the terms of the GPL.
As if that wasn’t enough, a class action lawsuit has been filed because of the Palm Profile backup issues that some people have been suffering. It truly amazes me that we live in a world where people will sue over absolutely everything.
From Pre Central- “File under “inevitable.” A class action lawsuit has been filed in California against both Palm and Sprint over the problems some people have been having with restoring their Palm Profile. The suit, filed on behalf of Jason Standiford (and others), seeks “relief for the loss of personal data suffered.” The suit repeatedly alleges that Palm only keeps the most recent backup and refreshes it every 24 hours, arguing that “Once a new backup is completed, all information from previous backups becomes irretrievable.” We have heard of Palm managing to grab older data, however, as even Standiford experienced…”
