Apple Inc. has just scored a win against HTC, and technically, the entire Android ecosystem, in one major round of its bruising international patent battle, this time with the International Trade Commission (ITC).
But with legal and patent experts stating that the win is a much smaller one than what Apple was hoping for, it remains to be seen how much this will actually affect HTC and other Android smartphone manufacturers.
On Monday, the ITC, a U.S. government agency, ruled that some HTC smartphones being sold in the United States had features violating a single Apple patent, and that they would be subject to an import ban that begins in April 2012, about four months from the date the ruling was made.
Shortly after the ITC ruling, HTC made a public announcement saying “[T]he ‘647 patent is a small UI experience” and that HTC was confident it would be able to remove the feature before the looming deadline.
The win might be Apple’s most significant legal victory so far against HTC and possibly Google’s Android operating system, since the patent in question relates to a core feature of smartphones today, including Android smartphones. While the patent itself is worded vaguely and relates to the smart processing of “objects” embedded in other documents, the specific and most obvious implementation in relationship to the lawsuit is the automatic linking of phone numbers on a Web page to a phone call to the phone number itself; a feature core to smartphones nowadays.
At the same time, the ITC handed Apple a victory on only one patent. Apple had earlier brought a full 10 patents against HTC in its filing with the ITC. The ITC’s ruling basically turned down three other patents related to signal processing and other fields, some of which patent experts have said were far more central to smartphone operations and would have been harder to work around. The ITC ruling was also weaker than its own preliminary ruling, which indicated that HTC infringed on two patents. HTC had appealed that intermediate ruling.
Scorched Earth Smartphone Wars
