Apple sues HTC

Experts are now weighing in on the Apple Lawsuit against HTC. Will HTC and Google rise to the challenge? I think so.

On Tuesday morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that it had sued Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC for, in Steve Jobs' words, stealing Apple's patented technology. See Apple strikes back.

By Tuesday afternoon, the experts had begun to weigh in, although few seemed to have any familiarity with the 20 patents named in the complaints. We'll get to what they had to say in a moment.

For now, the closest thing we have to an expert on these particular patents is Engadget's Nilay Patel, who did a thorough teardown of No. '949 –  so-called iPhone patent — last January. That's when Apple COO Tim Cook, referring to the Palm (PALM) Pre, first threated legal action against "people ripping off our IP [intellectual property]."

In a long Engadget post filed Tuesday, Patel walked through the 20 patents at issue in these cases and concluded, as most observers have, that Apple's real target is Google's (GOOG) Android operating system. (The company seems content to let the Pre run out of steam on its own.)

Apple has "organized its attack very carefully," Patel writes, splitting the case in two and filing it in two different courts.

Broadly speaking, the 10 patents brought before a U.S. District Court in Delaware cover the way users interact with a touchscreen — unlocking a device by swiping the image of a lock, for example, or setting in motion a list that seems to have its own momentum and bounces a little when it hits bottom.

The 10 patents filed before the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington are older, operating system-level patents — some dating back to NeXT — that cover such details as how an object-oriented programming language exchanges messages or handles multitasking.

The older, OS-level patents brought before the ITC, Patel says, would traditionally be considered stronger. But either court could issue fines or stop HTC from selling the phones named in the suits.

"The real question now," he concludes, "is how HTC is going to respond — and whether or not Google is going to get involved."

The rest of the experts — the ones who don't seem to have read the patents — are more concerned with strategy and precedents.

Kevin Rivette, a patent lawyer and former vice president for intellectual property strategy at I.B.M. (IBM), told the New York Times' Brad Stone that the lawsuit “is the opening shot in a war":

"Apple is island-hopping, attacking first the Asian companies. Then it can go after Motorola, gradually whittling away at Google’s base. They want to break the Android tsunami.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, agrees, and told the Times' Nick Bilton that it's not too late for Apple to drag Google into the case:

Continue article at CNN Money