“The ITC ruling on Apple’s first complaint against HTC (filed in March 2010) was scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday, December 6, 2011),” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “Today the ITC published this official notice, according to which the target date has been extended by eight days, i.e., to Wednesday, December 14, 2011.”
“The ITC is struggling to cope with a huge caseload. It has recently postponed a number of decisions and hearings.,” Mueller reports. “This delay cannot be reasonably interpreted to provide any indication as to what the outcome will be. However, the fact that the delay is relatively short (eight days) indicates that the ITC is very close to a decision and unlikely to postpone it again (though it could).”
Mueller reports, “Whatever the outcome will be, this is still the early stage of Apple’s assertions of intellectual property rights against Android. It’s not going to be the end for either party’s aspirations. If there is an import ban, the key question will be what implications a possible workaround (which HTC and Google are sure to announce) will have.”
Read more in the full article here.