For Apple, 1 out of 10 Aint Bad

Apple had originally sued HTC claiming that it violated 10 patents regarding its iPhone. In an initial ruling by the United States International Trade Commission, they had found HTC in violation of two patents. Today that number dropped to one, and it doesn’t seem that HTC is that bothered.

In a statement to CNET, HTC general counsel Grace Lei said: “We are gratified that the commission affirmed the judge’s initial determination on the ’721 and ’983 patents, and reversed its decision on the ’263 patent and partially on the ’647 patent. We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it. However, the ’647 patent is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.” Some analysts feel this will have zero impact in the United States at all.

So, what did we learn from all of this? Don’t copy Apple? Don’t try to improve upon anything Apple has done? No. We learned that when you’re first to market with an idea, it’s going to be copied and it’s hard to maintain complete sole-provider status for very long, unless your idea is so freaking unique that to copy it would be blatant.
According to Foss Patents blog,

So what Apple has won is a formal import ban scheduled to commence on April 19, 2012, but relating only to HTC Android phones implementing one of two claims of a “data tapping patent”: a patent on an invention that marks up phone numbers and other types of formatted data in an unstructured document, such as an email, in order to enable users to bring up other programs (such as a dialer app) that process such data. The import ban won’t relate to HTC Android products that don’t implement that feature, or that implement it in ways not covered by those patent claims.

If Google can implement this popular feature, which users of modern-day smartphones really expect, without infringing on the two patent claims found infringed, this import ban won’t have any effect whatsoever.

Otherwise HTC will have to remove this feature, which would put HTC at a competitive disadvantage as compared to other smartphone vendors, including other Android device makers.

The Foss Patents post goes on to say that this ruling does little to Force HTC out of the market. Apple’s patents need to be more strategic, if you will. More interestingly than this ruling is that companies are using the ITC because it seems to be more efficient than the Federal Court system. The CNET article points out that also, because if rules against by the ITC, companies can face an embargo, they’re more likely to settle. Also, HTC doesn’t have this plethora of patents and recently acquired S3 Graphics, because of it’s patents that could be used against Apple.

I’m not that into patent law, but it makes for an interesting observation. I wonder how many more little patent scuffles there are going on out there…

About SeedCo
PPC: Seed Corn Advertising is an online Advertising Network based in Los Angeles, California committed to establishing new business development partnerships and to grow your search network and ours.Learn more about SeedCo
PPC by visiting us at Advertising Search Engines, PPC Advertising and Search Engines PPC