Late on Friday evening HTC found itself in troubled waters when ITC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), Carl Charneski determined that the Taiwan-based smartphone maker had infringed two of the ten Apple patents asserted in the investigation.
The two patents in issue are :
-
U.S. Patent No. 5,946,64 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 in 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.
Charneski’s finding is subject to review by the full six-member commission, the highest-decision making body of the ITC, in Washington.
Should the commission uphold the finding, the ITC may ban U.S. imports of some HTC phones that run on Google Inc’s Android, the most popular smartphone operating system in the U.S.
Michael On, President of Taipei-based Beyond Asset Management Company, said, “ This is not the worst-case scenario for HTC which was not found guilty of violating the other eight patents. They will probably resolve the issue by paying royalties, which will raise costs.”
Intellectual Property Activist Florian Mueller is of the opinion that Apple is unlikely to grant HTC a license for these patents and might claim damages.
HTC, the second largest maker of smartphone in Asia, it seems will not take the decision lying down. The company intends to make a vigorous appeal before the commissioners who make the final decision.
An Apple spokeswoman, Kristin Huguet, declined to comment on the HTC findings.
This is the first legal judgment which finds Android in infringement of third-party intellectual property rights. What makes it even more interesting is the fact that apart from HTC, these two patents are also the subject of dispute between Apple and Motorola and Apple and Nokia.
The judgment also has severe implications for all Android products on the market, irrespective of the maker. The two patents are infringed by a code that is at the core of Android. As Mueller pointed out, “It’s hard to see how any Android device could not infringe them, or how companies could work around them.
The HTC decision may serve as a barometer for other cases Apple has against makers of Android devices, including Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.
US International Trade Commission is becoming increasingly popular as a patent enforcement agency especially, but not exclusively in connection with smartphones, because it can order import bans against products infringing intellectual property rights.
Mueller posted in his blog, “About three months ago, the ITC staff (which participates in the proceedings only as a third party) had issued a recommendation against Apple’s infringement allegations. At the time, six of the ten patents Apple originally asserted in its first ITC complaint against HTC were in play, and the ITC staff felt that there wasn’t any valid one among them that HTC infringed. But the ALJ apparently arrived at a different conclusion concerning two of the patents. And those two appear to be extremely important.