Patently unfair
Apple filed a lawsuit against Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC for allegedly infringing on ‘20 Apple patents related to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.' The suit was filed with both the U.S. International Trade Commission and in U.S. District Court in Delaware.
CEO Steve Jobs had the following to say on the matter: "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
This is pretty typical of the kind of sanctimony that tends to accompany such legal action. "Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours," said Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel, when it countersued Nokia last December.
Nokia legal veep, Ilkka Rahnasto, said the following when it brought the action against Apple last October: "By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation."
As ever it will be down to the lawyers to sort this out, but we can't help recalling a Wired report of a Jobs comment at the end of January: "We did not enter the search business," he said of Google. "They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them."
The product he was referring to was the Nexus One and, as we all know, it's manufactured by HTC. Coincidence?
