Taiwan's HTC sues Apple over patents | Hacker News Reader

Taiwan's HTC sues Apple over patents

reuters.com

50 pointstilt19 comments

You have to wonder how much cheaper mobiles would be if companies hadn't a) patented all the obvious ways to do things and b) spent millions suing each other.

I blame the patent office. There was a segment on NPR yesterday where they pointed out in some cases there are thousands of patents that cover the same invention. Isn't that why you have a patent office... to prevent this from happening? Instead all the real decision making is kicked (expensively) into the courts.

I don't think it's ever been as clear as now that the patent system is broken. Everyone is suing everyone else, and if anything innovation just goes on in the background regardless of patents.

Think we're going need a new "who's suing whom" graph, getting hard to keep up... (http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/whos_suin...)

When it comes to patent litigation, it's safe to assume that they all are, or will be, bi-directional.

Unless one side has no products.

If one side merely has no (relevant) patents, it usually just means they're going to go buy some patents and then make their counter-suit.

Maybe true but that obscures the fact that the recent escalation of patent madness is caused by Apple suing every Android manufacturer. What I'm saying is, Steve Jobs is an asshole.

The Android strikes back! Start of the patent apocalypse.

Here is a way to abolish patents -- overload the court system with it.

The cynic in me says that will just lead to a bigger court system as they hire more lawyers and judges to handle the increased load.

That's a way to battle unemployment that is caused by technological progress... just enlarge the not-productive sectors until everyone has a job shuffling papers around.

My next startup is going to be Heroku meets Angie's List for Telephone Sanitizers.

Help the world and make your next startup's business model "pay us to find prior art to invalidate patent X, and open source our results"

I'm assuming this new suit is based on patents HTC acquired from S3?

Are the patents in question known?

There are links to them in this article: http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/16/htc-sues-apple-patents/

One article I read suggested "two of which HTC acquired through a $75m purchase of ADC Technologies in April. (The third was homegrown at HTC.)"

US Patent #7,417,944 (ADC) US Patent #7,672,219 (ADC) US Patent #7,765,414 (HTC)

Wouldn't it help if Google sued on behalf of all device makers now that it has much larger trove?

Motorola is already suing Apple(and Apple is suing Motorola) over Motorola's patents. That shouldn't change with Google's acquisition, and any resolution of the suit would probably make Apple a licensee of the patents, making them immune to any suits over them.

A patent holder is not required to license their patent. If found valid by the court, they are free to enjoin others from using their technology for the duration of the patent period.

Motorola is counter-suing Apple, though. Without knowing exactly what patents each party is saying the other is infringing on, I would wager that the endgame for both companies is now a cross-license agreement more than an injunction against the other's products.

But given that all these device makers are facing the lawsuits because of their adoption of android its fair for Google to take the moral responsibility and countersue everyone who is suing the device makers. It looks odd that they are left to defend for themselves here.

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