“Many commentators took at face value HTC’s declaration of ‘an actual victory’ after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that it had infringed Apple’s patent on software that allowed a user to dial a number embedded in an e-mail simply by clicking on it,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “That particular feature was only one of 10 patents Apple had tried to assert, HTC argued, and the Taiwanese manufacturer of Google Android phones had already found a way to remove it.”

“Now it looks like Motorola may have to do something similar about Apple’s patented method of flipping through pages in a smartphone photo gallery and zooming in on a particular image,” P.E.D. reports. “Another Android phone manufacturer — Samsung — was already forced to drop the feature by a Dutch court’s injunction in August.”

P.E.D. reports, “‘While one or two wins of this kind won’t be enough to change consumer preferences,’ [FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller] writes, ‘the aggregate effect of the enforcement of half a dozen or more patents of this kind could make an appreciable difference in user experience.’”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: “Thermonuclear” in the cumulative sense.

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