“When Apple Inc and HTC Corp last week ended their worldwide legal battles with a 10-year patent licensing agreement, they declined to answer a critical question: whether all of Apple’s patents were covered by the deal,” Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta report for Reuters.
“It’s an enormously important issue for the broader smartphone patent wars. If all the Apple patents are included -including the ‘user experience’ patents that the company has previously insisted it would not license – it could undermine the iPhone maker’s efforts to permanently ban the sale of products that copy its technology,” Levine and Gupta report. “Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which could face such a sales ban following a crushing jury verdict against it in August, asked a U.S. judge on Friday to force Apple to turn over a copy of the HTC agreement.”
Levine and Gupta report, “In a court filing, Samsung argued it is ‘almost certain’ that the HTC deal covers some of the patents involved in its own litigation with Apple… In opposing Apple’s injunction request last month, Samsung said Apple’s willingness to license at all shows money should be sufficient compensation, court documents show. Apple has already licensed at least one of the prized patents in the Samsung case to both Nokia and IBM. That fact was confidential until late last year, when the court mistakenly released a ruling with details that should have been hidden from public view.”
Read more in the full article here.
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