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Apple Wins a Battle in the Patent War With HTC

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Recently Apple went after HTC for supposedly violating ten of its patents related to smartphones and tablets. Today Apple got an initial victory in that patent dispute, according to Business Insider. What kind of ramifications will this have for the smartphone industry?

It’s reported that the International Trade Commission found two of the ten patents as infringing on Apple’s patents. What will this mean? It’s too early to say for sure, but this could open doors for lots of messy legal wrangling. Apple has previously asked for all HTC imports to be banned due to the alleged infringements. It’s more likely that HTC would end up having to dole out large sums of cash to Apple and (possibly) be forced to change some of their designs for future devices, but it’s all speculation at this point.

If HTC can be found in violation of these patents, who else does that open the door to? We know Apple is already going after Samsung, but depending how generic the violating patents are, nearly any Android manufacturer would be fair game for legal action.

Earlier this year, Steve Jobs was reported as saying the following in a press release:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

We all know that Apple popularized touchscreen mobile devices with the iPhone, iPod touch – and later the iPad. We also know that various Android phones and tablets from companies like Samsung and HTC naturally arrived later on to bring their own take to the table. Now we’re starting to see how courts react to the question of whether they crossed any legal lines or not.

We’ll keep you posted, and try not to get any bloodstains on our clothing from these nasty legal cage matches.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. ethibault

    07/16/2011 at 11:18 am

    even if samsung loses I won’t give back my galaxy s2… :-)

  2. Ama-at

    07/17/2011 at 3:37 am

    Steve Jobs is a BIG THIEF himself when he started the Apple. Ask him where he stole the Apple Operating  System?

  3. John Kiser

    07/17/2011 at 5:59 pm

    This was really the ruling of only one judge at the ITC… it hasn’t gone up with the whole Committee and onto the people that have the authority to actually make these decisions but who normally do follow ITC ruling/investigation all of which other than one judge made every single one of those patents negligible…

    For the record the patents in question are those “broadly worded and vague” kind that just basically are so broad that they encompass any computer and elelctronic device… This stuff existed for a long long while now and is common place in the computing world so its asinine these patents were even given out in the first place, but given how broken the US patent system is this is not too surprising at all. 

    They need to start revamping that sucker to actually do what its intended to do and full on require someone filing a patent to make it much more narrow than it really is so that its “their method” for doing it and allow other methods to be thought up and all. Stop with the broad patents that could really encompass anything.

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