Patent Wars Stories Part 1: Apple Fails to Get an Import Ban Against HTC Phones

dgstorm

Editor in Chief
Staff member
Jan 5, 2011
2,205
130
FDNewsDOJpatents.jpeg

What is it about the Summer that seems to make all the Patent and IP wars lawsuit stories heat up again? Perhaps it's just the timing of the courts, but it seems like just last year about this time, half of the news pertained to Patent Wars lawsuits. The trend seems to be continuing agin this year. We have three different stories in rapid succession for you guys.

This first one is is an HTC win against Apple. Just in cased you missed it previously, HTC lost a case against Apple in which one of Apple's patents was violated succeeding in holding up the HTC One X and its Sprint version the EVO 4G LTE at U.S. Customs. HTC was able to show that they had changed/removed the offending software feature, and the phones were allowed to continue into the U.S. for sale.

This wasn't good enough for Apple though. Apple still claimed that the phones infringed upon their patents and requested an emergency import ban with the U.S. International Trade Commission. Apple complained to the ITC that HTC made misleading and false statements to U.S. Customs officials regarding the devices in order to secure their importation. There was an investigation by the ITC.

Since then, the ITC found that there was no violation and rejected Apple's request to ban the devices. Here's a quote with their statement,

"The commission finds that Apple has not demonstrated the propriety of temporary emergency action here. The commission will not direct Customs to detain all subject HTC products because the commission does not have the information necessary to determine whether the respondents are currently violating the commission's limited exclusion order."

It's nice to see some good news for Android related to all of these lawsuits, but we still have two more stories to share in this series today, and it's not all good news.

Source: CNet
 
Last edited:
Top