Apple vs HTC: ITC Rules in Favor of Apple; War Not Over Yet

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Apple is fighting in courts with every major name in the mobile business and that’s understandable considering what’s at stake here, as this particular niche is going to be even more important in our future lives. Nokia, Samsung or HTC are just a few of the wars Apple is currently engaged here and today we’re looking at an early ITC ruling in Apple’s case against HTC.

Apple is basically claiming that HTC is violating some 25 patents, in total, and while we’re yet to see a settlement between the two companies, we already have a ruling from an ITC judge that already offers Apple a first victory against HTC. But the battle is not over yet for HTC as it’s an “initial determination” made by an administrative law judge. This determination will be reviewed by the Commission, following which we’ll have a final decision.

According to FOSS, here are the patents in question:

• U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data” (in its complaint, Apple provides examples such as the recognition of “phone numbers, post-office addresses and dates” and the ability to perform “related actions with that data”; one example is that “the system may receive data that includes a phone number, highlight it for a user, and then, in response to a user’s interaction with the highlighted text, offer the user the choice of making a phone call to the number”)
• U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a “real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data” (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs; in its complaint, Apple said that this patent “relates generally to providing programming abstraction layers for real-time processing applications”)

Google may want to step in here and backup HTC and its partners as these two patents are apparently very important since they appear to be violated by Google’s Android OS rather than anything HTC-specific. And while the war between Apple is HTC is far from over, it would be interesting to see how Apple will play this in case the Commission’s final ruling will be one unfavorable to the Taiwan-based manufacturer. HTC is already paying licenses fees to Microsoft for every Android smartphone it sells, and it may end up coughing up some significant cash to Apple too.

As with all the other legal battles in the tech world, and particularly those focused on the smartphone business, we’ll keep tabs on this conflict as is may have some important effect on both Apple’s and HTC’s mobile businesses.