Quote Originally Posted by GTSRboy View Post
It sucks that HTC keeps breaking the law and infringing on Apple's patents, i know companies historiclly cant help themselves but copy Apple, and in this case directly copy Apples technology

i know this forum will bizarrely misconstrue this into Somehow being apples fault (aparently its evil to protect your patent?)

Ask yourselves, if the technology is to 'stupid' and pointless', then why is HTC replicating it? hmmm....
I guess you haven't read most of the patents that Apple is using against HTC? Here's a nice breakdown of all the patents involved: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/a...ent-breakdown/

That includes things like: "Patent #7,383,453: Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor

Another deeply technical patent, granted in 2008. On reading the claims, we're going to hazard a guess and say it covers powering down a processor when told to sleep, but this sort of patent is exactly why this litigation will take years and require many hearing to determine exactly what's covered."
That's basically a law of nature, they just patented P = Vē/R.
You should not be able to patent: "Making opening a door easier by reducing the mass of the door, thereby reducing the amount of force needed to swing open the door." That a law of nature and not something you should be able to patent.

Or how about this patent: "Patent #5,455,599: Object-Oriented Graphic System

This is the oldest patent of the bunch, issued in 1995. (You can really get a sense for how Apple's counsel has changed the way it writes patents over time by reading all of these, by the way. The older ones are really quite terse.) Again, it's technical to the point where we don't feel comfortable saying exactly what it means, but it covers building graphics objects with a processor and outputting them through various means. Given the fact that this predates Steve Jobs' return to Apple, we'd say this one was thrown in because Apple's lawyers think it's particularly strong, not because it has something to do with phones specifically."
That basically includes pretty much every single computer related system that has a display, even the PC at the cash register in your local supermarket for example. A bit odd that they'd get this patent in 1995, getting a patent for something that is being used by quite a lot of companies is a bit like getting a patent for the wheel in this day and age.

This is the patent many of you already mentioned: "Patent #7,657,849: Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image

This one's cute 'cause it's brand new -- seriously, it was just granted on February 2. It's almost exactly what it says on the tin: it covers unlocking a touchscreen device by moving an unlock image. It's broad enough for us to say that it covers virtually every unlock behavior we've seen on phones, not just the iPhone's slide-to-unlock implementation."
It was granted this February the 2nd. It seems a bit odd that this patent was even granted, but that has already been mentioned by a few others in this thread.

Just read up on the other patents if you will. You'll probably come to the conclusion that at least half of these patents should not have been granted and that most of these patents are too vague. To me this seems like a pretty risky move by Apple, as Apple will most likely loose most of these patents in the process. That said, Apple only need one patent that's considered to be violated by HTC to succeed, unless HTC can prove that Apple is violating one of their patents.