Apple, Google, Dell, HP, and even companies like the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group are all being slapped with patent infringement via InNova Patent Licensing (patent trolls) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall.

MacRumors points out that this court in particularly is trigger happy in pursuing patent infringement cases.

The federal lawsuit focuses on a revolutionary InNova patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,018,761, that covers technology used to differentiate between spam email messages and those that users actually want to receive.

Patent-infringement attorney Christopher Banys, lead counsel for InNova, says the company’s patent is one of the building blocks for all email communications.

“More than 80 percent of email is spam, which is why companies use InNova’s invention rather than forcing employees to wade through billions of useless emails. Unfortunately, the defendants appear to be profiting from this invention without any consideration for InNova’s legal patent rights.”

So that spam filter in Gmail? The stuff that keeps those viagra ads from hitting the employee inbox? That’s all supposed to be patented. While the media isn’t being clear on what’s exactly at issue, it all comes down to this:

The patent, however, describes methods for storing “context information” associated with an email address, such as the person’s real name and business affiliation, in a database. Recipients’ email applications could then automatically access the database when a message arrives, providing identification information on the sender. The database would render it unnecessary for senders to specify certain email header fields such as adding a real name to the “From” field or adding a signature to each email message, while also serving as an aid to separate emails sent by known or otherwise legitimate senders from those sent by spammers.

[via MacRumors]