HTC has been suffering from Apple’s patent lawsuits for quite some time now, but tables have turned and this time HTC has a lawsuit filed against the iPhone maker. Tuesday saw the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer accusing Apple Inc. for infringement of three patents of HTC. The Taiwan-based company filed the complaint with the U.S. District Court of Delaware and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), claiming that the violation of HTC patents was not only for iPhone, iPad and iPod product lines, but even for Mac computers.
Grace Lei, HTC General Counsel said that the lawsuit was filed in order to protect the intellectual property and commercial partners of HTC. This act was even for those consumers who are using HTC phones. He stated that the iPhone maker needs to stop infringing the inventions which are patented by HTC.
Talking about the patents which are claimed to be infringed, it covers a number of functionalities relating to mobile devices. The list includes the processor communication technology integrating a cellular phone to a PDA, so that it works as one single device. Along with it, the Wi-Fi capability in even in the list which gives a user an option to get connected to a number of devices via a single wireless-network. The patents which have been termed by HTC as infringed by Apple are 7,765,414; 7,672,219; 7,417,944.
Can was reported by a senior analyst at International Data Corp. (IDC), Joey Yen that this act of HTC is more or less a counter-attack to Apple’s lawsuits which have been filed against HTC. IDC analyst continued saying that HTC might be trying to impede and disrupt Apple’s success story which would force the Tech Giant to incorporate other resources to fight the legal battle.
This lawsuit may be a new story for HTC filing a lawsuit over Apple, but in the past even the Taiwan-based company has dragged Apple in a legal suit in regards to an intellectual property issue. Back in May 2010, ITC was asked by HTC to block the sales of iPods, iPads and iPhones which were manufactured off the Apple warehouse as they had infringed HTC’s five patents. However in this case a final ruling would be hammered this year in mid-September.
This year on July 26, Apple had a ruling against its luck as ITC ruled that Mac OS X has been infringing two patents of S3 Graphics Co. Ltd. which is a subsidiary of HTC. These patents relate to texture compression. However, the ruling even noted that even though iPad and iPhone are running on the same iOS, the do not infringe the said patents. S3, not being satisfied with the ruling appealed against the decision which was made by the ITC administrative judge.
Looks like the ‘tit for tat’ rule is being used by both of these companies who have been filing lawsuits against each other for a long time now. Apple might be the stronger party in here, but HTC cannot be termed as a weaker counterpart. Apple has been in a battle of lawsuits not only with HTC, but even Samsung and Motorola which seems to be a war over Google’s Android indirectly.