(Courtesy of Wu Yausu)

If you’ve been following Judie’s nook post, you may have noticed a debate about the Barnes and Noble/Spring Design lawsuit. Thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone can read Spring Design’s complaint, and being the intrepid blogger that I am, I set aside my distinct lack of a legal background and combed the document for any interesting tidbits.

As was mentioned over in the nook comments, Spring Design does allege that Barnesandnoble.com president William Lynch told them, “He [Spring Design] should not consider Amazon as a content partner, because Amazon was likely to steal Spring’s unique idea without ever buying anything from Spring.” Excuse me, irony just strolled by cackling uncontrollably.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, so I’m not going to comment on whether any of this means there’s a case. However, it does seem awfully damning when you read the whole case; everything indicates that Barnes and Noble had a good, long look at a competitors product, and then came out with an evil twin.

If you’d like to read the whole complaint yourself, you can find it at wikileaks; if you have any legal background and want to comment, please do.