Patent Wars: Return of the Apple lawsuit.
This Monday Apple have filed yet another complaint against a rival smartphone manufacturer, this time claiming that the Taiwanese company HTC have infringed on several of their patents.
Bloomberg reports that the complaint links to several HTC devices which are alleged to have “borrowed ideas” from Apple.
This isn’t the first time Apple and HTC have locked horns in a patent complaint battle, however. Back in 2010 Apple first filed a patent complaint against HTC for similar reasons, to which HTC responded by launching a complaint right back, even claiming that Apple infringed on five of their own patents.
That issue was settled when an ITC lawyer said it would be in the public’s interest for them to side with HTC, which is what was supposed to be the end of this dispute. Clearly this hasn’t bothered Apple, who is now going after HTC again. We’re trying to dig up some information on just what this patent complaint relates to, and we’ll let you know as soon as we find out.
Apple also recently took out a much larger patent complaint against Korean manufacturer Samsung. Apple felt that Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone and Galaxy Tab devices “borrowed heavily” from their iPhone and iPad range.
A court injunction was filed by the Cupertino Company last week, whereby Apple were seeking to ban the sale of four of Samsung’s biggest products in the US: The Galaxy S 4G, Infuse 4G, Droid Charge and Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Samsung fought back and tried to gain access to Apple’s forthcoming iPhone and iPad products, but were denied by US Judge Lucy Koh.
Will the legal battles between smartphone manufacturers ever end? Not if Apple have anything to say about it, we feel.