Cover Flow may cost Apple $208.5 million in damages

Apple has been ordered to pay more than $200 million to Mirror Worlds, LLC after having lost a patent infringement case brought by the company. Apple was found to be in violation of Mirror Worlds' "document streaming" patents, which Apple allegedly used in its implementation of Cover Flow and Time Machine.

Mirror Worlds brought the lawsuit against Apple in 2008, accusing the company of infringing on four patents, three of which covered a "document stream operating system." The fourth patent extended the other three, describing an information management system based on the document streams.

The document streams outlined in the patents would contain many different types of documents with a similar theme, and would be organized in chronological order and displayed in a pile. Sound a lot like Cover Flow and Time Machine? That's because it is. Anyone who's familiar with the visual document layout of those two technologies knows that they use the same concept: visually displaying documents in a pile that you can scroll through (as pictured above).

The case went all the way to trial, and a federal jury in eastern Texas agreed with Mirror Worlds on three of the four patents (the fourth was tossed earlier this year). According to Bloomberg, Mirror Worlds' founder David Gelernter said he was "tremendously grateful" to his lawyers for their performance, but neither he nor his lawyers commented further on the verdict.

$208.5 million is a drop in the bucket for a company with Apple's bankroll, but it has to be an irritation for a company that has been implementing similar document display concepts in Hypercard for far longer than the patents ever existed.