ITC to ban select HTC Android phones in Apple patent win
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Apple landed a potentially major victory against HTC on Monday after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in its favor and found that some of HTC’s Android smartphones and tablets violated one of its patents.
In its ruling on the patent dispute between Apple and HTC, the ITC also handed down a ban on the importing of specific HTC Android devices that goes into affect April 19, 2012.
The HTC phones or tablets banned by the ITC will include any that run on Google’s Android 1.6 Donut to 2.2 Froyo mobile operating system, according to Gizmodo.
The decision doesn’t specifically call for an import ban on phones running newer versions of Android such as 2.3 Gingerbread, 3.0 Honeycomb or the new 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Most newer HTC phones and tablets run on Android Gingerbread, and some (such as the HTC Rezound) are due for upgrades to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
In its complaint to the ITC, Apple accused HTC of violating a number of its patents, each of which are older than smartphones themselves.
But the ITC found HTC in violation of only one of Apple’s patents -- patent 5,946,647, which Apple was awarded in February 1996 and covers the ‘system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data,’ or basically a patent for handling the actions that take place in the background when you do something as simple as tapping a link in an email to open it in a Web browser.
In an emailed statement, HTC lawyer Grace Lei said that the company was pleased that the ITC found that it wasn’t in violation of all the patents Apple accused it of infringing. As for the one patent it was found to be in violation of -- patent 5,946,647 -- HTC said it would alter its use of Android to avoid the problem.
‘We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it,’ Lei said. ‘However, the 647 patent is a small UI experience and HTC will completely remove it from all of our phones soon.’
Apple officials were not available to comment on the commission ruling Monday.
From here, the ruling still has to be approved by the ITC’s president, who has 60 days to sign off on the decision or veto it.
If the decision sticks and the import ban comes to fruition, HTC will still be able to sell whatever it has in the U.S. before April 19 of next year. The Taiwanese company also has until Dec. 19, 2013, to import refurbished devices ‘to be provided to consumers as replacements under warranty or an insurance contract (whether the warranty or contract is offered by HTC, a carrier, or by a third party),’ the ITC said in its ruling.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+