Once again, fueling the patent and injunction wars that have heated up of late, HTC has decided to make its presence felt in the party by filing a new lawsuit against Apple. The suit, filed at the U.S District Court of Delaware alleges that Apple has violated two of its patents and that these technologies were used in Apple’s Mac Computers, iPads, iPods and iPhones – virtually everything that Apple makes – in short.
HTC has also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission, the organization that has the authority to ban the import of infringed goods into the US. HTC is asking for nothing short of a ban of importing of Apple products in the US. This is apart from seeking monetary compensation as damages that are three times the “normal” damages amount for willful infringement. HTC claims that Apple has infringed upon their intellectual property thrice and that the Cupertino based company needs to stop doing this.
As for the actual technologies that HTC claims to have been infringed upon, they include technologies that go behind the ability of Wi-Fi enabled devices to connect to multiple devices. Additionally, the lawsuit also talks about a “processor technology” that is used to combine the functionality of a phone and a PDA in one single device. HTC had also back in July filed a lawsuit against Apple in the UK. Details regarding that one though have not been made public yet.
The news of this latest lawsuit comes at a time when Google bought out phone maker Motorola – most possibly in a bid to strengthen its arsenal of patents that it can use against Apple. While Google is yet to square of one on one against Apple, this might just be the uneasy calm before the storm as Google might be waiting for the completion of the deal that would make almost 17,000 patents owned by Motorola Mobility their own.
Apple is yet to respond to this latest lawsuit from HTC. The company has also been on the offensive of late and had sued HTC, Samsung Electronics and Motorola Mobility in the not too distant past. In fact, they also managed to get an injunction on the sales of the newest Android tablets from Samsung in Europe. That injunction has, however, been restricted to Germany as you might have read earlier.
