Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble Over Nook IP

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 3, 2009 @08:40AM from the first-out-the-gate dept.

bth writes to let us know that Barnes & Noble has been sued by a company called Spring Design, which alleges that the recently announced Nook e-book reader infringes its intellectual property. This isn't a patent troll kind of situation; rather, the claim is misappropriation of trade secrets. Spring Design claims that they have been developing a dual-screen, Android-based e-book reader since 2006, filing patents all the while; and that they showed pretty much everything to Barnes & Noble in the expectation of working together with them to bring their reader to market.

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Re:I'm shocked! by Korin43 · 2009-11-03 09:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yes but if you want to share ideas with someone and not have them beat you to market, you can make them sign a contract saying they won't make the same device for some amount of time. In this case, they should have done that, but they didn't, so I see nothing wrong with B&N making a similar product.