Apple Seeks to Block HTC Tablets, Phones

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) Apple Inc. (AAPL) filed a patent- infringement complaint against HTC Corp. (2498) at the U.S. International Trade Commission that seeks to block imports of the Taiwanese phonemaker’s phones and its new tablet computers.

Apple accuses HTC of infringing five patents related to software architecture and user interfaces in portable electronic devices, hardware for touch screens and movement sensors, according to the complaint filed July 8 in Washington.

The patents cover “groundbreaking technologies developed by Apple in conjunction with the development of its innovative iPhone, iPad and iPod touch products,” Apple said in the complaint, its second against Taoyuan, Taiwan-based HTC.

Apple has been using the trade commission, which has the power to keep products out of the U.S. market, to pursue makers of mobile phones that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system and compete with its iPhone. With the filing of the complaint against HTC, and one filed July 5 against Samsung Electronics Co., Apple is expanding the battle to tablet computers that challenge the market position of the iPad. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-11/apple-files-new-trade-complaint-against-htc-over-devices.html

[originalpckelly]

1. Apple is rotten to the core.

Anti-competitive, they have cornered the market on phones and players. And they are now taking assholier than thou actions regarding the selling of goods in Apps. They also need to open the architecture up so you can download an app outside of the store and install it on the device.

[Taverner]

4. Having worked for Apple, let me agree with you

What's funny is that their impetus for choosing BSD as their base system for OS X was not because they liked UNIX, but because they couldn't lock their older OS down enough.

What needs to happen is Blackberry, HP, IBM and Motorola need to join forces, and make Android more functional and faster.

But yeah, Jobs has said that they want to 'own the complete user experience' and that they look to Disney, not other Tech companies as their inspiration. I would not be surprised if Apple eventually bought Disney Corp. Similar cultures, similar zombie-like fan base and similar attitudes by their founders.

[Rex]

2. This is like when microsoft forced IE onto all the Netscape users.

And as we learned from mircosoft...the first person or entity to win legal ownership gets the prize!

[tammywammy]

3. If Apple owns the patent, then they have all the right to defend it.

Intellectual property rights are very important, and if anyone feels that someone has infringed on their copyrights then they should file suit.

I place intellectual property rights higher than anything negative I feel about Apple.

[Taverner]

5. Patent Law is a bit more complicated than that

Consider the underlying OS to any Mac product: FreeBSD (specifically, a port named Darwin)

This is open source code, and is free for anyone to do anything with. When you use the Apple interface, everything going on is translated to BSD Unix commands. So there is no functionality added by their interface. Even NetInfo, which was their Enterprise OS, is public domain software.

Then let's move to the internals - many of them patented chips that do not belong to Apple, but the forerunners before them. Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, Sun (now Oracle) and so on.

So what about the design of their products? Well this is one thing Apple could claim, although they don't own the rights to streamlined interfaces and throbbing icons.