Apple may have been filing lawsuits against Samsung claiming that the latter was infringing on its patents but now it has found itself at the receiving end of a legal issue as HTC filed a counterclaim against Apple alleging that several of Apple’s products infringe upon two patents that it has recently acquired from HP. The two patents are supposedly going to help the Taiwanese manufacturer beef up its ante against Apple in the lawsuit.
The two patent infringement counterclaims from HTC deal with network services and management and both were acquired by HTC from Hewlett Packard in December. The lawsuit for both the infringements was filed in a United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. One of the patents deals with the “installation of network services in an embedded network server” and HTC is alleging that this patent was infringed upon through devices such as the MacBook line of products and even the mobile communication devices like the iPhone and iPad. The other patent relates to centrally managing a computer network and this appears to be used in Apple Remote Desktop and Apple Profile Management.
The legal battles began in 2010 when Motorola Mobility filed a lawsuit against Apple. The latter had filed six counterclaims in the same case and HTC was one of the targets in the same issue. Since then, HTC has been trying to build up its patent portfolio to battle Apple’s lawsuits that seek nothing short of banning sale of HTC products in the U.S.
In another recent case, Apple tasted victory as a judge dismissed five patents that HTC alleged were copied by Google. These patents were supposedly licensed to HTC for a limited period of time in a move to give more liberty to Android equipment makers without actually involving Google directly. These patents were cited in a case with the International Trade Commission (ITC) and though the lawsuit looked legitimate, the case was dismissed by a district judge. Other attempts by Apple to block HTC sales had varying results. In December, the ITC ruled in favor of Apple over HTC relating to an infringement on Apple’s patents on “data tapping” techniques. This led to a hold up in the imports of HTC One X and Evo 4G by US Customs but it was subsequently allowed.
