
Apple has patented their implementation of regions, which presumably
includes the internal data structure (which has never been officially
documented by Apple).  Apple cannot patent the concept of a region.

I'm guessing that either NuTek reverse-engineered Apple's internal data
structure for regions (I dunno if this would hold up in court), or they
came up with their own data structure.  If it's the latter, then they
won't be able to draw PICT files containing regions.  Besides PICT files,
there aren't many places where regions are stored on disk.  (QuickTime
movies, perhaps?)  As long as the region isn't being stored on disk and
transferred from a Mac to a NuTek clone (or vice versa), it doesn't
matter if NuTek uses a completely different internal data structure.

I remember reading that Apple also has a patent on their ADB hardware,
and that the NuTek clones would therefore be lacking an ADB port.  What
other patents does Apple have on the Mac?