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Apple Wins Injunction Banning Import of HTC Devices
Newly accepted submitter squish18 writes "All Things D reports that Apple has won an injunction banning the import of some HTC phones starting in April 2012. The ruling by the ITC stems from two claims of the '647 patent concerning software used to enter personal data in mobile devices. It is interesting to note that the ITC has also reversed previous rulings regarding regarding infringement of two other '647 claims, as well as patent '263 claims."
It looks like Apple's victory is relatively minor. They lost claims on all patents except for one, and HTC/Google can work on implementing similar functionality in a non-infringing way.
HTC gave Android Central the following statement (updated 6:20 EST): We are gratified that the Commission affirmed the judge’s initial determination on the ‘721 and ‘983 patents, and reversed its decision on the ‘263 patent and partially on the ‘647 patent. We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it. However, the ‘647 patent is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.
Maybe you didn't read the date on the patent. It was filed in 1996 and granted in 1999. This patent isn't an iPhone patent. It's a Newton patent.
More to the point, the patent application was filed before Google, HTC, or Zimbra were even founded—back in the day when Palm was just starting to take off. You're going to have to look a lot farther back than the Zimlet for prior art.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you know anything about game theory you know that the optimal strategy depends on the behavior of the other participants. For example, if there is one company that is offering a high quality product for a low price, competitors must do the same thing or no one will buy from them. However, there is a technique called "conscious parallelism" that allows companies to screw over their customers in concert with each other without actually having any formal agreement (which would violate the antitrust laws), and it works like this: One company raises their prices, or imposes some new restriction, or offers a shorter warranty, etc. As soon as they announce this, every other company in the industry does the same thing, with the expectation that as long as they all do it, customers will have no choice but to go along with it. Then all the companies benefit and all the customers are screwed.
This doesn't work if any one of the companies decides that they would rather compete on the merits by offering a quality product for a low price, because naturally all of the other companies that don't want to compete on the merits will lose customers to them (which is why company that doesn't join the implicit cartel wants to do it). This is why you see everybody trying to fight Google: They're offering decent products basically for free, which screws up the whole cartel dynamic, so they have to be "punished" by all the people who want to use conscious parallelism to line their pockets rather than working hard to earn honest money.
I mean look at what they've done to the whole curated computing scheme: If your only choice was between Apple's app store and Microsoft's, and you could only make that choice once every two years when you get a new device, and they both used all the same terms as one another and slowly made them more onerous... think about all the money those two would be able to extract from customers and software developers once they had them by the short hairs like that. But Google is upsetting the Apple cart, so to speak, because allowing developers to reach users outside of the "official" channels means that the different app stores have to compete with one another on the merits. Apple can't start ratcheting up their own margins because if they do then more users and developers will go to Android, where there are several markets and Apple can't expect everyone to follow their lead on pricing. Hence the litigation.
So I guess what I'm saying is, companies don't inherently have to screw over their customers, but if they choose to buck the trend then they can capture a majority market share... at the cost of having to deal with a bunch of sore losers flinging lawsuits at them.