An ITC judge ruled that HTC violated two of Apple Patents, According to FOSS Patents those two pantents is at the core of Android and expected to be infringed by all Android devices.
Those patents are apparently infringed by code that is at the core of Android. It’s telling that those two patents are also at issue between Apple and Motorola (and the ‘263 patent was also used by Apple against Nokia). A while after Apple started suing HTC, Motorola filed a declaratory judgment action against a dozen Apple patents including those two. Apple then counterclaimed by asking the court to determine that those patents are valid and infringed by Motorola. So the relevance of this goes way beyond HTC!
The two violated patents are :
- U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data”.
- U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a “real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data” (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs…)
This could mean big problems to Android and HTC might get banned from marketing any Android device in the U.S.
