“The public filing of the Apple-HTC license agreement, with the exception of its financial terms and a few details, is the most important smartphone patent news in the build-up to the Apple-Samsung injunction hearing,” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “The first license deal ever to have become known between Apple and an Android device maker certainly raises the question of whether Apple’s current leadership has softened its stance compared to what the company’s iconic co-founder and two-term CEO, Steve Jobs, had in mind when he sued HTC in March 2010 (and two other Android device makers, Motorola and Samsung, within 13 months). Time and time again Apple’s adversaries have pointed courts to a passage in the biography authored by Walter Isaacson. Purportedly, Steve Jobs vowed to destroy Android because he considered it a stolen product, and said he was willing, if necessary, to spend all of Apple’s cash reserves on the pursuit of this cause. According to the book, he even declared himself prepared to wage ‘thermonuclear war.’”

“This reporting has led people to believe that Apple’s patent enforcement against Android was an emotional crusade more so than a smart business choice, and has made Apple appear to be a ruthless, anticompetitive aggressor,” Mueller writes. “I never believed any of that. In many interviews over the last 12 months I’ve urged reporters not to attribute to emotion what can be explained with strategic/competitive needs (differentiation vs. commoditization) and, especially, not to attach too much weight to what was, if authentic (which I obviously don’t know but which I’ll presume in the following for the sake of simplicity), merely a private comment and thus can’t be compared to public statements. In particular, comparing a private remark by Steve Jobs to public statements by his successor, Tim Cook, would be completely flawed and unlikely to lead to accurate conclusions.”

Mueller writes, “The different things Steve Jobs said must be weighted according to context. The logical starting point is not his biography but the press release with which Apple announced the HTC lawsuit in March 2010. It contains this Steve Jobs quote: ‘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,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘”We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.’ There’s no contradiction between that statement and the published terms of the deal.”

Much more in the full article – very highly recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: The walls are slowly closing in on the serial patent- and trade dress-infringers; the Apple wannabes who’ll never be.

And none of your derivative Droids are going to be able shut down all the garbage compactors on the detention level, either. This is how the worm turns.

Ever so slowly the screws of justice grind, yet grind, they do. Tick-tock, slavish copiers. Tick-tock.

Related article:
Samsung files redacted copy of ‘very lopsided’ Apple-HTC deal in U.S. court; Distinctive Apple User Experience not for sale – December 6, 2012
Boom! Apple sues HTC for infringing on 20 iPhone patents – March 2, 2010