A small Maine technology company is suing industry giant Microsoft for patent infringement. SurfCast, based in Portland, says it patented a concept called Tiles back in the 1990s. A statement on the company's website, announcing the lawsuit, charges Microsoft with making Tiles the centerpiece of its new, Windows 8 operating system. Jay Field reports.

SurfCast's patent diagrams show what look like computer screens, with rows of symmetrical tiles. Inside the tiles are different kinds of content - a web browser, an email account, a music player, a clock, a calender.

One diagram shows an appointment reminder that's popped up over the rest of the tiles. It's this feature that's at the heart of the patent lawsuit, says Erin-Michael Gil, chief intellectual property officer at MDB Capital Group in Santa Monica, California.

"It's how you get notified - a live tile," Gil says. "They got into some of the details around how these tiles could work."

Back in May, Microsoft released a preview of its new operating system, Windows 8. It contained a brand new start screen with columns of tiles, made to look like apps, that update in real time. Officials at SurfCast declined to comment for this story when reached by phone.

But Gil says they likely did a double take when they took a look at Windows 8 for the first time. "The fact that Microsoft made that sort of front and center - it was sort of obvious that SurfCast was going to engage Microsoft in some meaningful way about licensing or having those patents acquired by Microsoft," he says.

If some kind of deal is reached, it will likely have something to do with action taken by SurfCast this week in U.S. District Court. The company sued Microsoft for patent infringement.

Some industry analysts and lawyers following the case have raised the possibility that the suit is an example of another so-called "patent troll" run amok. In these cases, companies use patents to go around intentionally suing big players in the industry, in the hope that the Microsofts, Cisco Systems and Apples of the world will just throw some money at them to make them go away.

Like many of these companies, SurfCast patents haven't led to any actual products it plans to sell. But Gil says the company may very well fall into a slightly different category "of small innovative companies or people that have got actual, real innovation, either licensing agressively or litigating patents as a business model, and getting paid for doing real research and development. In some cases, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development have gone into developing what ends up being nothing more than a patent portfolio.

Gil says the big players sometimes dip into those portfolios as they make products that go on to be used by millions of people.

Microsoft officials would not talk on tape for this story. But in an email, a spokesman for the company wrote: "We are confident we will prove to the court that these claims are without merit and that Microsoft has created a unique user experience."

"There has to be some merit - otherwise, a firm wouldn't pick up the case and file an action," says Leonard Agneta, who heads the Maine Patent Program and is on the faculty at the University of Maine School of Law.

Agneta says the case could take as long as five years, if it goes to trial. "When someone brings an action against a big player like Microsoft, it's going to be a very difficult road for them," he says.

And an expensive one. Agneta says SurfCast wouldn't have brought the case, if the company didn't have the money to pay the legal bills it will incur in any trial. Maine doesn't see all that many patent law cases. So Agenta says he and his colleagues at the Maine Patent Program will be watching it with great interest.