There is a saying in soccer: if you don't score, the other side will. After all the talks about Apple suing Palm over 360-page multi-touch patent, Fruit giant from Cupertino got sued. When Palm Pre won accolades at CES Las Vegas in January 2009, Apple started to send statements such as "Apple will vigorously protect their patent portfolio". The problem was that we got contacted by one of the multi-touch engineers, who told us in confidence that suing anybody over multi-touch electronics isn't a good idea.

The first problem was that Palm owns US patents about the multi-touch and capacitive displays, second was that Palm isn't the only one. At the time, we didn't have the information who was involved - but we got our answer. We had our doubts when Elan Microelectronics took a defensive stance and stated that their patent doesn't infringe with Apples, but it turns out that Apple's solution might infringe on Elan's one.

Multi-touch maker wants an injunction against Apple... a shape of things to come?

Five minutes before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California closed, Taiwanese chip designer Elan Microelectronics filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., over the alleged infringement of two of their U.S. patents.

To make the situation interesting, Elan Microelectronics is asking for injunction on production, use and sell of Apple's multi-touch enabled devices: iPhones, iPod touches and touch-enabled Mac Books. We sent out e-mails to both parties, but were unable to get any information at the time of writing.