HTC One X Phone Held by Customs Due to ITC Ruling

zacharye writes, quoting BGR: "The launch of Sprint's flagship EVO 4G LTE has been delayed indefinitely and supply of AT&T's flagship HTC One X will be constrained as a result of ongoing patent disputes between HTC and Apple. HTC confirmed in a statement emailed to BGR on Tuesday evening that shipments of its new EVO 4G LTE and One X smartphones have been held up by United States Customs as part of an International Trade Commission investigation. Before the phones can clear Customs, the ITC will need to determine that HTC's new handsets are in compliance with an earlier ruling..."

Comments

Re:Google needs to stop this

[RaceProUK]

What's Motorola got to do with this? This whole issue is because Apple is trying to screw HTC into the ground over patents.

Patent In Question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't find any info yet on the patent in question, but Apple had won a patent ruling back in December. HTC was suppose to resolve it to avoid an import ban. Here are the details.

The patent in question, 5,946,647 was granted in 1999 and covers identifying data "having recognizable structures," such as a "phone number, post-office address, e-mail address, and name." Then, the patent says, a "parsing process" will allow "appropriate actions" to be taken

If this is still the issue, thank god that the courts are there to protect inventors of such important magnitude. It's horrible to think that someone who could come up with the idea of parsing a phone number would not be adequately compensated. I can't imagine how much R&D Apple has spent in the process. An import ban is the only appropriate resolution.

BTW, in this legal case, Apple had sued for 10 separate patents. Out of the 10, this is the only one that the courts upheld. I can't imagine what the other 9 were like.

Re:So did HTC

[icebike]

sell these to Sprint knowing they would be held up at customs and possibly not be able to sell them in the US?

Actually MILLIONS already entered the country and were sold by AT&T and independent retailers. Only when this phone started taking
serious sales away from Apple did they start complaining.

HTC has long ago removed the offending patent item. (And Apple ultimately lost on all other claims in this particular suit.) A single item in the '694 patent was upheld, namely having a url sent in a text message be treated as a real url and launching the browser when tapped. (My ancient Razr feature phone did that - sans the tapping part).