A Texas company has targeted Apple in a new lawsuit regarding a handful of computer networking patents issued in the 1990s.

US Ethernet Innovations claims that Apple's MacBook Pro's network interface did not spring fully formed from the head of Steve Jobs but was technology patented by 3Com. A patent, entitled "Network Interface with Host Independent Buffer Management," numbered 5,299,313, was issued in 1994 to 3Com.

US Ethernet Innovations bought the patents from 3Com and appears to be enforcing them.  In addition to Apple, the lawsuit names Acer, ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, Sony and Toshiba as defendants. It asks for compensation for the alleged infringement, and requests a trial by jury.

The hope is of course that all the named people will pay up for a licence for technology that they thought they already knew. Patent trolling has become big business in the US.