14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC Corporation has won a patent dispute with iPhone maker Apple this week, when a judge in the UK ruled that it did not infringe on Cupertino-based company’s intellectual property.
Previously, Apple claimed that HTC was infringing on four of its patents related to the user interface of mobile phones, and even managed to win some disputes with the smaller phone maker.
The new ruling was given in a lawsuit in which HTC was trying to invalidate the patents that Apple claimed to be its own, and which the judge found to be a development in the light of a similar feature that was found on a Swedish device.
There were four patents cited in the litigation, which Apple also used in other lawsuits against Google’s Android operating system.
The patents are: - The action of unlocking a device through performing gestures on an image. - The use of multilingual keyboards with various alphabets on mobile phones. - A system through which it was determined which screen elements were activated through single-finger touches and which through multi-finger touches. - The bouncing effect that emerged when the user dragged an image beyond its limits.
The judge said that the first three patents Apple claimed HTC infringed were not valid, and that the fourth did not apply to the case.
“HTC is pleased with the ruling, which provides further confirmation that Apple's claims against HTC are without merit. We remain disappointed that Apple continues to favor competition in the courtroom over competition in the marketplace,” the handset vendor commented, BBC reports.
Apple has been involved in a wide range of litigations with major players in the mobile landscape on claims that they are either copying its products or that they are using technologies that infringe patents it holds in the area.
The company even managed to ban sales of Galaxy Nexus handsets (made by Samsung) in the United States recently, claiming that the phone’s search capabilities are similar with what it has packed inside its own devices. Google is currently working on a software workaround for the issue.