“On Wednesday, [U.S. patent] 6,473,006 turned up in a pair of lawsuits — one filed at the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, the other in a federal court in Delaware — filed by HTC against Apple,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune.
“The iPhone, HTC claims, has violated this patent that came to HTC by way of Google, Myriad, Purple Labs, Openwave and Phone-com,” P.E.D. reports. “HTC, of course, is suing Apple because it was sued last year by Apple — the first of many complaints Apple would bring against the manufacturers of devices running Google’s Android operating system. Apple claimed at the time that HTC had violated 20 of its patents.”
“Tit for tat, right? Not quite,” P.E.D. writes. “The difference is that Apple actually invented the technology it accused HTC — and by proxy, Google — of ‘stealing’ (to use Steve Jobs’ verb)… HTC and Google, by contrast, are accusing Apple (whose smartphone designs they have plainly copied) of violating patents they bought fourth or fifth hand.”
Read more in the full article here.
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HTC sues Apple using patents obtained last week from Google – September 7, 2011