Palm Inc. (PALM) was recently sued by Artifex Software Inc. for infringing its registered technologies – muPDF, which is used in the Palm Pre phone.

Headquartered in San Rafael California, Artifex is the developer and copyright owner of muPDF, a high-performance PDF rendering engine. MuPDF is Artifex’s lightweight PDF interpreter for the PDA and e-book markets.

Artifex said that Palm used muPDF in its phone but did not obtain a commercial license from Artifex. MuPDF is available for free on the Internet for unsupported use but cannot be used in commercial products.

Artifex filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Palm for the unauthorized copying and distribution of muPDF in the Palm Pre PDF viewer application, which was launched in June 2009.

Artifex is a pioneer in open source software providing page description language renderers for PDF, PostScript, XPS and PCL under the GPL. Over 100 companies license Artifex PDL technologies including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), International Business Machines (IBM), Konica, Kyocera Corp. (KYO) and Xerox Corp. (XRX).

Earlier, Apple Inc. (AAPL) had blocked the use of updated iTunes software on Palm’s Pre which restricted users’ ability to download free music, photos and videos via iTunes. Apple reported that it has sold 1 million units of the new iPhone 3G S smartphones in just 3 days, since the launch of the new model on June 8, making it the most successful model launched to date.

Palm had expected Pre to drive sales and turn the company’s fortunes around. But the company is under severe pressure as the Pre is not selling and the company is facing increasing competition from Apple’s iPhone.

Palm failed to get Artifex’s permission for commercial license and also failed to comply with the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). We expect Palm to pay high penalty charges for the lawsuit and Palm’s brand identity to be impaired.

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