Word is making its way through the grapevine that Apple is being sued by a small company who claims iTunes’ interface is violating patents it own. AppleInsider reports:

Contois Music Technology last week asked a Federal Court to stop the iPod maker from distributing its iTunes jukebox software and is seeking damages over an alleged patent violation by the iTunes software.
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In the 10-page suit obtained by AppleInsider, lawyers for Contois said that David Contois conceived of and developed a computer interface for playing music on an internal or external computer-responsive music device, which he then exhibited at the 1995 COMDEX trade show and the 1996 NAMM music industry trade show.

According to the suit, persons who were at the time employed by or later became employed by Apple were present at both trade shows and viewed Contois’ software. The suit charges Apple later “copied” the invention and used the design ideas in the interface for its iTunes software.

UPDATE: Apple holds a patent on iTunes’ interface, according to a CNet news.com article.

Deep Thought’s take:An interesting part of the AppleInsider is as follows: “Specifically, Contois documented 19 interface aspects of the iTunes software that it claims are in direct violation of Contois’ patent. These areas include iTunes’ menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.”

If I’m not mistaken, just about every other music player out there allows you to transfer music to a portable player and sort music by certain attributes, and I’d say that the three-column “browse” view in iTunes is more based on OS X and NeXTSTEP’s column view. After all, in both iTunes and the Finder, you’re working down a hierarchy of sorts. The ability to sort by different attributes is a direct offshoot of the Finder and other file browsers. The ability to transfer music to a player is an offshoot of being able to transfer files to a removable disk. Okay, so future Apple employees were at conventions where this concept was demoed. But this begs one question; how many people are actually going to remember the details of an interface four years after seeing it for a very short period of time? Not many. Am I the only one here growing sick of software patents?

I’m just glad I don’t work with anything dealing with patents. What a painful job that must be.