THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT at Intel has two fresh pieces of litigation to deal with this week, which will probably send our favourite Chipzilla spinner out onto the balcony at Satan Clara again to have a quick ciggie.

In the first case, Intel is being sued by one Philip Jackson for allegedly breaching a patent he owns. The patent in question is 4,596,900 which has the snappy title of “Phone Line Linkted Tone Operated Control Device. This patent registered as long ago as 1983 when I was a mere slip of a grown man, is being breached, Jackson claims, in a whole set of products – ten in all which include Intel’s Netmerge Call Processing Software, the Netmerge CT application, Envox CT Connect, and Intel Net Structure Host Media Processing Software. Mr Jackson wants a jury to award him money for the alleged breaches.

The other legal case was filed on the 9^th of April in the Californian Northern District court. Intel alleges that a Mr Alex Park, who is doing business as Intelcube Systems, is breaching its trademark. Intelcube appears to specialise in point of sale (POS) products. As the world+dog knows, Intel is very very jealous of the five magic letters i+n+t+e+l. It gets irritated when journalists use Intel as a shortened version of intelligence, but we don’t think you’ll find Chipzilla attempting to sue the pants off the CIA or the NSA. No sirree.

The most celebrated Intel trademark litigation was a good while ago, when Intel attempted to trademark the letter “i”. Another curiosity of the past happened when it sued a yoga group attempting to rehabilitate prisoners under the name “Yoga Inside”.

Intelligible.com is in my possession but so far Intel has seemed strangely vague about suing the pants off me. My pants aren't worth very much, mind... Intel wishes we were Inside practising yoga. µ