It seems that, with every passing day, legal battles are a bigger and bigger part of the tech world landscape… and the latest lawsuit from HTC against Apple has only shown that’s not going to stop any time soon.
HTC has recently acquired certain patents from Google as recently as last week and is now suing Apple for infringing upon them. The patents were originally acquired by Google from Motorola Inc., Palm Inc., and Openwave Systems Inc. and were then transferred to HTC on September 1st.
As mentioned by 9to5 Mac, HTC wasted no time loading their guns and pointing them at Apple:
Six days after acquiring the nine patents, HTC today filed a suit in Delaware against Apple claiming patent infringement on four of the patents (originally issued to Motorola) that they acquired from Google. However, they aren’t letting the remaining patents go to waste either, they also filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission for five of the others (two originally owned by Palm and three by Openwave).
The ongoing trend of litigation over patent disputes has seen all the major players (Google, Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc.) both initiating and receiving, and it’s a trend that casts an ugly pallor over the entire industry. The potential for patent disputes to stick and then yield substantial monetary rewards is the reason that we have to deal with “patent trolls” like Lodsys who merely exist to file patents in hope that they can somehow be leveraged later on to get money they didn’t actually earn. With luck and time, the legal system may adjust its dealing with these sorts of cases to make them less of a reflexive act by corporations and more of a meaningful instrument of justice.
Source: 9to5 Mac
