Artifex Software Suing Palm Over the PDF Viewer in the Pre

Posted on 05 December 2009 by Juventino Quinones
Tags: Palm, Palm Pre, smartphone, software, webOS

We knew that Palm, sooner or later was going to get hit with a lawsuit, as soon as someone noticed that the Palm Pre was getting attention. Apparently, Artifex Software is first in line, according to Business Wire, a copyright infringement lawsuit has been filed against Palm Inc.

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Headquartered in San Rafael California, Artifex Software Inc. is the developer of muPDF, which, according to Artifex, is distributed as open technology under the GPL, freely available on the net for unsupported use, but not for distribution in proprietary commercial products. And according to Artifex, Palm failed to obtain a commercial license for its use and also failed to complied with the terms of the GPL.

Below you can read part of the Press Release from Artifex referring to the lawsuit:

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. Palm’s intentional refusal to comply with the terms of the GPL means that Palm willfully copied and distributed muPDF without authorization, and any and all such copies infringe Artifex’s exclusive copyright.

The president of Artifex Software; Miles Jones, also had something to say on the matter.

As evidenced by the number of companies that legally license our technologies, muPDF is an outstanding technical choice for a lightweight, high-performance PDF renderer. Artifex makes the choice simple for those who copy Artifex software for distribution: Comply with the terms of the GPL, sign an OEM license agreement with Artifex, or do not distribute our software. We have an obligation to protect our copyrights for ourselves, for our customers, and for every member of the open source community.

So far there is no word from Palm about this lawsuit, let’s just hope that both companies can settle this as fast and civilized as possible. And with no damage to Palm, I hope, I’d hate to see Palm going down because of something like this.