Michigan’s Cygnus Systems, Inc., a company focused on networking support and development, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit (PDF) against Microsoft, Apple, and Google for&mash;get this—using icons to represents files. But not just any icons: representational thumbnails that reflect the onscreen display of a particular document or file. Such miniaturized thumbnails are now a common feature of many software products, including Apple’s Finder and iTunes software (think Cover Flow), Windows Explorer, and Google’s Chrome browser—and if Cygnus is willing to go after those three companies, they might be considering action against Adobe and Opera (which have products with similar interfaces) and even Web-based music and photo services like Amazon’s MP3 Store and Flickr which, after all, offer thumbnail representations of files.
