The glorious Apple religion has scored a key patent which now means that anyone who comes up with touch screen technology might have to pay Jobs' Mob shedloads of cash.

World of Apple spotted the patent, which was awarded to Steve Jobs, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, and Wayne Westerman, one of the founders of a company called Fingerworks that Apple acquired in 2005.

The patent is extremely long, and covers many of the methods used by the iPhone to display data, such as pinch-to-zoom Web browsing and swipe-to-scroll. Yesterday COO Tim Cook's warned Palm that it would be getting nasty if iPhone competitors nicked its IP it would use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal.

Palm said that if Apple wanted to sue them they should “bring it on”.