Apple Inc. was sued Wednesday over allegations its iTunes online music store and iPod music players are illegally using a patented method for distributing digital media over the Internet.

Atlanta-based ZapMedia Services Inc. sued Apple in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing the Cupertino-based company of violating two ZapMedia patents.

ZapMedia wants royalties on Apple’s sales of iPods and iTunes music, which reached nearly $11 billion last year. The success of iTunes has helped make Apple the No. 2 music retailer in the U.S. behind Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to market researcher NPD Group.

The patents in question cover a way of sending music and other digital content from servers to multiple media players, a broad description that could also apply to a wide swath of other companies selling digital media and the devices to play it.

ZapMedia applied for the patents in 1999. One was granted in March 2006, the other on Tuesday.

ZapMedia said it met with Apple to discuss licensing, but Apple rebuffed the offer.

“When someone takes our vision and our intellectual property without a license after several attempts, we have no option but to protect it through every means available to us,” Robert Frohwein, ZapMedia’s general counsel, said in a statement.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on pending lawsuits.

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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Microsoft on Tuesday announced the release of Office 2008 for Mac 12.0.1, an update to its office software suite for Mac OS X. The update is available for download from Microsoft’s Web site or using the Microsoft AutoUpdate application.

Overall, Microsoft documents improved security in this release that fixes vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to over the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. Microsoft also noted that the Office Installer no longer grants restricted users unauthorized access to Office 2008 for Mac program files.

Microsoft has documented a significant number of fixes in the specific applications included with Microsoft Office 2008, as well. Stability has been improved in Word and Excel, fixing issues that could cause either application to quit unexpectedly. Performance has been improved when opening PowerPoint, and has addressed problems with Entourage data synchronization.

Entourage reliability has also been improved when connection to IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange servers, and Entourage’s stability has been improved when you use the Database Utility to rebuild a large identity database.

Other improvements to Powerpoint include saving to an SMB volume and character spacing and layout. Excel gains improved support for secondary displays, better reliability for ledger shields, improved reliability for copying and pasting linked data and charts and more. And Word improves citation deletion and font substitution, no longer prints blank packages when printing to a high resolution printer, and a bug fix for opening documents that contain Word 2007 for Windows equations.

A complete list of changes is available from Microsoft’s Web site.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Thursday’s introduction of an iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) has game developers everywhere excited about the possibilities of iPhone game development, especially after seeing game demonstrations during the event. Developers agreed that Apple is pushing the iPhone as a major portable gaming platform.

“This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in game development in 15 years, except maybe for the Nintendo Wii,” said Glenda Adams, director of development for long-time Mac game publisher Aspyr Media.

Adams said that iPhone development plays uniquely into Aspyr’s strengths: their in-house developers have experience with the core technology that the iPhone uses, such as OpenGL, Cocoa and Apple’s user interface. They also have experience developing applications for the mobile space.

Electronic Arts (EA) and Sega both showed off iPhone games in development. EA showed off an iPhone-specific version of Spore, the forthcoming game from Will Wright, maker of The Sims and SimCity, while Sega introduced an iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball, a game that first appeared on Nintendo’s GameCube console.

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