Submitted by Well, this is about as surprising as the tides rolling in: HTC has sued Apple for patent infringement. Earlier this year, Apple sued HTC, focussing on the Taiwanese phone maker’s Android devices. HTC has now responded with a patent suit of its own.
As usual, the complaint is filed with the US International Trade Commission, and HTC asks the ITC to ban US import of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. HTC lists five patents, such as “Method for Power Management of a Smart Phone”, “Telephone Dialer with Easy Access Memory”, and “Power Control Methods for a Portable Electronic Device”. Yeah, they sound just as vague and idiotic to me as most other patents these phone makers are throwing at each other. Engadget has more on the patents.
“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America, HTC Corporation, in a press release, “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”
Whereas the US and the Soviet Union successfully managed to prevent mutual assured destruction during the Cold War, phone makers have been unable to do so. Patent lawsuits are flying back and forth left and right, and the ITC and American justice system have a lot of work to do to clean up this mess.
Let’s hope this stuff finally opens the eyes of American politicians to finally get their heads out of the sand and fix that damn patent system, and do something about the total and utter incompetence of the USPTO.
And then, I’ll have my flying unicorn.
Does anybody else care? I mean… really? I’m sure they’ll eventually settle it out of court for an undisclosed sum of money, so this is really non-news.
It may be non-news that mega-corp B is throwing legal fees at mega-corp A. For me, the value is that it is being report which helps to draw attention to the rabies riddled dog that is the US patent system. Even then, I wouldn’t care so much except that poor US policies usually end up effecting us along the northern border and in general, have far reaching effects on computerdom.
Apparently the ticking time bomb which is the Touchscreen technology patent is still in possession of the original inventors and has not expired at all :
http://www.google.com/patents?id=bdMBAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA1#v=onepa…
Yep, ELOtouch systems ( formerly elographics) . My guess is they either have a deal with the vast majority of companies using touchscreens or those companies are their customers . This is one of the few companies which could sue the lot of them and have a very good case to make .
… in the darkness, bind them.
I swear it’s turning into some elaborate game, like a CCG only in this game they’re not playing with cards, they’re playing with patents…
It’s like, to big companies, the US patent office is the local card shop where you spend loads on ‘patents’ trying to make sets and build as strong and diverse a deck possible… and the legal system is the platform upon which companies engage in ‘epic’ battles against each other with their decks of ‘patents’. The game ends when one of the player’s ‘companies’ runs out of money, patents, or appeals.
Uhoh… I hope I haven’t given anyone any ideas for a new game… Maybe I’ll just patent the idea! Yeah!
You can’t. I already own a patent for “Something”.
But the winner of this game gets control.
They don’t have to worry about competing in the market – they are protected from competition, just sit back relax and let the profits role in. Knowing that no matter how little they spend on R & D in the future no competitor can ever arise they can just be squashed in the courts.
The likely outcomes;
A patent war between large IT corporations would be bad, damage the world economy and put people out of work. The alternative of large corporations forming patent cartels so that they can prevent new players joining the market and stifle competition is worse
hehe I like this post.
I keep thinking of the 1980s movie ‘War games’ in which a computer threatens to nuke Russia until it’s taught that there are no winners in war – only mutually assured destruction.
“I see you, and I raise you by … 3 patents!”
Wait they actually have less number-wise
I infringed their “Power Control Methods for a Portable Electronic Device” last night. Twice.
I turned my torch both on AND off…
Didn’t Apple’s lawsuit against HTC, and their lawsuit against Nokia, ask for the same thing?
Great.
The US patent system … ostensibly designed to promote technological innovation … is going to make it so that no-one in the US can buy any technology item, becuase they are all made elsewhere.
Does anyone else find this to be as utterly stupid as it seems to be to me?
Yes, that’s why you file a complaint in the first place to the ITC.
And patents were supposed to promote innovation? They are being used for fighting and the only people who gain are lawyers.
Why not patent legal procedures too? It would make legal cases even more interesting.
… but Apple deserved this. They sued HTC for practically for nothing. Now HTC sued them, Nokia sued the other day, I hope Google will sue them too. Apple obviously want to remove any iPhone competitor, I hope competition will remove Apple instead.
Edited 2010-05-13 10:44 UTC
I will shorten this shit before the kids wake up tomorrow.
1.) Circle jerk ‘patents are bad’
2.) Justify patents to look learned.
3.) ???
4.) Everyone else is at fault as Apple is GOD!
Apple’s lawyers are having a few busy years ahead.
And that makes me more than happy
Right now, between typing these words, I am eating an apple. Will I get sued for it?
If all those patent suits would be real, you could almost formulate the following theorem:
“Consider a set composed of any number of (smart)phone makers; if you take a 2-tuple of any of them (A,B), it is always possible to find a patent p owned by A that is violated by B.”