Just a quick thought concerning Apple’s current lawsuit against the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC over alleged patent infringement relating to touch-screen smart-phone technologies: basically, what happens if Apple win? Of course HTC will pay damages, some sort of agreement will be reached etc, but what about the wider implications?
It seems clear to anyone who has been inside a mobile phone shop since the launch of the iPhone that there are a great number of quite similar devices out there, from a variety of manufacturers. If HTC are guilty of infringing patents then probably so too are a number of other manufacturers (though perhaps HTC provides a good example of a much smaller and weaker company out of which to make an example – unlike Nokia for instance).
Regardless of the actual details of the technology involved (I’m neither an engineer nor a lawyer and so won’t comment), it seems likely that if the case is eventually settled in Apple’s favour there could be some quite significant consequences for the industry as a whole, and I don’t doubt that many of the other players in the smart-phone market are also following the situation closely. We’ll keep you posted with the results in coming weeks…
Dejan Levi