Artifex Software Inc. today filed a lawsuit against Palm, Inc for copyright infringement. The suit claims Palm utilized Artifex’s registered technology in their PDF viewer. muPDF is Artifex’s lightweight PDF interpreter, which the company claims was improperly integrated into Palm’s “PDF Viewer” app. Of course, this app is standard on all Palm Pre devices and the new Palm Pixi.
According to Artifex, Palm admits to using muPDF, but the company failed to obtain a commercial license nor complied with the terms of the GPL.
No word from Palm yet, as this release was just dropped by Artifex. Let’s hope both companies can settle this amicably.
[via Trading Markets]
Does anybody actually use the crappy PDF viewer on the Pre?
Well, Palm should be suing back for releasing a crappy product. I have yet to get a single PDF to actually open.
@Aaron lol, exactly…. it stinks
I have not had much trouble with it. If Palm included it, they should pay for it. It is that simple.
If Palm did not get the Pdfviewer license and by the other way it is a bad product I will take your words:Let’s hope both companies can settle this amicably.
I’ll gladly erase it from my Pre to get more app install space :-/
This looks pretty bogus. It’s licensed under the GPL:
MuPDF is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
MuPDF is Copyright 2006-2009 Artifex Software, Inc.
Between this and their handling of jwz’s GPL-covered app submissions, I’m starting to get the impression that Palm doesn’t actually understand Linux or the rest of the free software infrastructure that enabled them to build WebOS at all. Watch, they’ll buy their way out of this one rather than just releasing the source to the parts of WebOS that link to muPDF.