Apple is succeeding in its anti-competitive legal efforts to kill HTC

The patent that might kill HTC is for a ridiculously obvious "invention": Find "interesting" items in some text using a regular expression and present them to the user as clickable actions [1].

As a non-lawyer why am I confident my patent summary is accurate? Because that's what the Android code at issue here (Linkify) actually does (plus HTC included the processor, memory and other components to run this on, of course). Apple originally applied for it based on some behavior of the Power Macintosh help system.

Examples of potential prior art (though I'll admit they didn't include the processor and memory):

Live URLs in Netscape Navigator 2.0b1

Highlighting misspelled words in Microsoft Word 95 (if Word 95 included the context menu for misspellings, which I don't remember)

Potentially impacts:

- Every modern web browser (note that one of the things HTC has lost on so far is the behavior of their default browsers)

- Every modern email client (detecting clickable anything in email)

- Every word processor that lets you click on misspelled words and choose how to handle it (I guess Google shouldn't have added system-wide spell-checking to ICS)

- The search-result sub-items Google generates for some sites

- ...

[1] Whether or not alternatives can be presented is an open item of controversy, I believe. IIRC, handlers for file extensions were common at the time the patent was filed, though, which gets back to obviousness.

Apple has every right (and obligation) to defend patents that were legally acquired. You can argue that the patents are invalid but that is a different story.