If it's true then Apple must pay up. How much is such a technology worth? The story didn't say anything about damages being awarded or the disposition of the future usage of the technology. What's up?

He claims himself he no longer held the patents, he filed it in a middle-of-nowhere district that has statistically favourable patent wins, the idea was never marketed, and nobody even bothers to consider that maybe someone else came up with the same idea independently.

Yale professor or not, definite troll.

Frankly, I think apple could drop CoverFlow completely and no one would notice.

Pay off the obvious patent troll and move on. Problem solved.

My god these patents sound awfully vague and obvious.

If iTunes Coverflow is a violation, clearing holding playing cards fanned in your hand is a pre-cursor to this. Is it really any different?

Apple acquired the coverflow tech from a guy who posts over at Ars-- can't remember his screen name off hand. The Ars guy had been selling (or maybe it was freeware?) a very popular coverflow-esque piece of software and when Apple released their implementation everyone at Ars was like "Wow, dude, did Apple just steal that from you or what?"

He said that he and Apple had struck a deal but that he couldn't go into specifics. At any rate, that's neither here nor there for the purposes of the lawsuit, but if anyone appropriated old tech it was the original author-- and I'm pretty sure he wrote it from scratch for fun.

I think patents are like domain names. One can register a .com and never use it. So if you have a company that would like to use an existing domain, you can buy it from the registrar or use a different domain name.

Patenting an idea should have a conditioned time/expiration that if nothing has been made or applied to an actual usable product, then the patent will expire and becomes public.