Apple Sues HTC For 20 Patent Violations In Phones

eldavojohn writes "Taiwanese HTC is being sued by Apple for 20 patents regarding the many phones HTC manufactures. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, 'We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Apple has similar patent litigation with Nokia and may be trying to scare the rest of the industry into licensing patents similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."

Comments

Put it on the ground and walk to other side

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

First there's a patent that prevents the USPTO from rotating applications 180, and now they can't even turn their screen to read stuff?

Life in the thing-rotation space is getting pretty tight.

Re:Maybe Apple should pay their royalties first?

[Marcika]

Ahem.

"Apple reinvented the mobile phone in 2007 with its revolutionary iPhone®, and did it again in 2008 with its pioneering App Store, which now offers more than 150,000 mobile applications in over 90 countries. Over 40 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.

Steve Jobs was quoted as saying "We would like other companies to compete by re-reinventing their own phones, not stealing ideas like a screen you can touch or a program you can download for local use. These innovations are clearly thanks to us."

Yes, this phenomenon is known as Reality Distortion Field (or to use technical jargon, "lying scumbag executive").

A program you can download on your phone for local use? You mean like JavaME JAR files? Like the app store that GetJar started years and years before Apple?

A screen you can touch? Like the LG Prada, announced before the IPhone, or like hundreds of other touchscreen kiosks in the last three decades?

Yup. Apple. Re-inventing marketing.

Uh, you realize that Jobs's 'quote' above wasn't real, right?

No I didn't, though I knew the parent was being sarcastic... To my defense: reading through the actual complaint, he might as well have said that: Half of the claimed patents are about displaying documents on touchscreens, most others are such gems as "Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor"... Pointing out prior art and obviousness is left to some other humour-impaired slashdotter.