Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “In March 2010, after filing an ITC complaint and a federal lawsuit against HTC, Apple released an official statement with the following quote from Steve Jobs: ‘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… We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.'”
“That is still the only Apple comment on the HTC dispute. In fact, even after the ruling on Monday, a spokeswoman for Apple reiterated that position,” Mueller reports. “Not only does nothing in that statement suggest that a workaround is a negative outcome but the second part even suggests that ‘competitors should create their own original technology.’ That’s exactly what a workaround, or designaround, comes down to.”
Mueller reports, “His official biography states that shortly after he brought litigation against HTC, Steve Jobs met with then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and said: ‘I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.’ Again, that’s what HTC is now going to do with respect to the “data tapping” patent. What HTC calls a workaround sounds more like a throwout — a complete removal of the feature rather than an alternative implementation — but either way it’s just what Steve Jobs wanted. He wanted this with a view to far more patents than one, but Apple can now try to make his vision materialize one patent at a time. Its litigation has already resulted in several modifications of competing products, particularly on Samsung’s part.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.