Apple co-founder Steve Jobs threatened to file a patent lawsuit against Palm if that company's chief executive didn't agree to refrain from poaching Apple employees, according to a court filing made public, reports "Reuters" (http://tinyurl.com/a49voch).

The communication from Jobs surfaced in a civil lawsuit brought by five tech workers against Apple, Google, Intel and others, alleging an illegal conspiracy to eliminate competition for each other's employees and drive down wages. The defendant tech companies have attempted to keep a range of documents secret, notes "Reuters."

Last May Joseph R. Saveri of the national plaintiffs' law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, says Siddharth Hariharan, a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and founder and CEO of InEarth, today filed a class action lawsuit charging that several of the nation's leading high-tech companies -- including Apple -- violated antitrust laws by conspiring to fix the pay of their employees and entering into "No Solicitation" agreements with each other.

The complaint seeks restitution for lost compensation and treble damages for the anti-competitive employment practices of the aforementioned companies. The complaint alleges the conspiracy among defendants consisted of (1) agreements not to actively recruit each other's employees; (2) agreements to provide notification when making an offer to another's employee (without the knowledge or consent of that employee); and (3) agreements to cap pay packages offered to prospective employees at the initial offer.