Apple Inc. was handed a legal victory that is bad news for rival Google Inc., as a U.S. trade agency ruled that some HTC Corp. smartphones that use the Internet company's Android software infringe an Apple patent.
The U.S. International Trade Commission on Monday ordered HTC by April to stop importing handsets that infringe the patent. The Taiwanese company said it would remove the feature found to violate Apple's patent, a move that should avoid disruption to its U.S. business.
Apple's victory over smartphone maker HTC may not mean its handsets will be banned from the U.S. market. The WSJ's Deborah Kan and Taipei reporter Paul Mozur discuss.
Apple is tangling over intellectual property with multiple competitors around the world, in large part seeking to hobble rivals using Android-powered smartphones from taking a larger share of the business. The long-awaited ruling by the ITC is one of the first high-profile decisions in Apple's home market.
The ITC's decision narrowed an earlier finding that HTC was infringing multiple claims of two separate patents. Instead, it found that some HTC smartphones using Android violated only two claims of one Apple patent related to extracting information such as phone numbers from emails and doing something with the information, such as making a phone call. That invention, sometimes described as covering "data tapping," allows users to grab data embedded in an unstructured form, like an address, and use it in another phone application, such as mapping.
HTC said it would soon remove an infringing feature from its phones. Above, shoppers view HTC phones in a Taipei, Taiwan, store last week.
It wasn't clear how many HTC smartphones use the infringing technology. Grace Lei, the company's general counsel, said in a statement that the ruling involved a "small" user-interface feature and "HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon."
An Apple spokeswoman said "competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
The decision comes as HTC and Apple are tussling in a number of courts as they battle over their shares of the growing smartphone market. Apple's taking its fight to other Android handset makers, too, many of which are retaliating.
Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. also have filed cases against each other with the ITC seeking to bar the other from selling their products.
A spokesman for Google declined to comment.
Apple leads the market in the U.S., with 28.6% of the country's consumer smartphone subscribers in the three-month period ending in October, ahead of HTC, which had just over 20%, according to Nielsen. But Android devices, which often use email, maps and other features from Apple rival Google, pose a growing threat to the Cupertino, Calif., company and together have a greater share of the U.S. smartphone software market than the iPhone.
Despite the narrowing of the patent claims, some experts said the ITC decision was an important victory for Apple.
Alexander Poltorak, chairman and CEO of Suffern, N.Y.-based General Patent Corp., which advise companies on their patent strategies, says the decision "validates that the Android operating system has implemented a number of inventions from Apple." He predicted that the decision would "go a long way" in convincing HTC to consider a global patent settlement with Apple.
An HTC spokeswoman declined additional comment.
COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated December 12, 2011, I described in great detail a chronology of the parent infringement lawsuits filed by Apple versus Samsung, Motorola, Microsoft, HTC, Nokia, and Google.
In 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs meet with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt over a cup of coffee. I don't think those two were talking about sports or the weather, but about the fury of patent infringement lawsuits that Apple was about to file against Google and all handset makers usings its Android operating system.
Photo of a meeting between former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "Eric, the Android OS violates our Apple OS operating system patents, you give me no choice but to sue you and your handset suppliers."
Google stands at the center of this legal tornado because it is the developer of the Android operating system which is used in many mobile devices from smartphones-to-tablets developed by HTC, Motorola and Samsung. As you can see from the following chart, four years after Apple first introduced the iPhone, smartphones using Google's Android OS have opened up a sizable lead over Apple's iPhone.
Folks, we are talking about a lot of Android handsets sold since the end of 2009 when Motorola first came out with their Android phone, and it now appears that Apple's victory over HTC could lead to an avalanche of legal victories over Motorala Mobile (acquired by HP pending regulatory approval) and Samsung. Those lawsuits are now in the pipeline. The Samsung lawsuit is supposed to be heard later this month, but will probably flow over into 2012.
You can bet that Apple's victory is now sending shockwaves against all Android handset manufacturers, especially Google which developed that OS.
Courtesy of an article dated December 20, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal
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