Apple Patents Battle With HTC Lost In London

The High Court in London has ruled that HTC did not infringe any of the four Apple patents asserted by iPhone maker in the latest leg of their ongoing legal battle.

A judge ruled that three of the four patents were invalid, including one which involved the “slide-to-unlock” feature, while another did not apply to HTC devices.

Slide-to-unlock

Apple has cited its patent which concerns “unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image”, or rather “slide-to-unlock”, in a number of cases against Android manufacturers. According to the judge, HTC’s “arc unlock” feature would have infringed Apple’s patent, but for a device released in 2004, the Neonode N1, which showed a padlock on its screen with the words “right sweep to unlock.”

The judge added that it would have been an “obvious” improvement for the developers to have offered users visual feedback in the form of a “slider” in the way that Apple used, adding that such a concept had been used in Microsoft’s CE system.

The other patents included the use of a multilingual keyboard that offered different alphabets on portable devices, a system to determine which elements of a screen were activated by single finger touches, multi-finger touches and which ignored touches, as well as a “portable electronic device for photo management.”

The last patent, also known as the “photo gallery page-flipping patent”, was found not to be infringed by HTC.

The decision made in London could have implications in lawsuits between the two manufacturers in other countries, especially in Germany, which was one of the reasons that HTC initiated proceedings in the UK. Analyst Florian Mueller noted that the court is the most defendant-friendly patent court in the world with only 15 percent of patent infringement claims brought in the UK resulting in a violation.

Preemptive attack

“The litigation was started by HTC itself as a declaratory judgment action for defensive purposes in hopes of influencing the outcome of German lawsuits Apple had previously brought,” Mueller said, adding that he expects the ruling to have very limited relevance in the US, but some impact in other European countries and Australia.

“HTC brought the UK action in order to get a better outcome in Germany. German courts do take note of rulings in other European countries, but they are free to decide differently,” he added.

“The UK decision involves only four of Apple’s many patents. In the short term, this means HTC has nothing to fear in Europe (unless Apple wins a preliminary injunction somewhere), but the Apple-HTC dispute will continue and Apple will find new patents to assert.”

Apple won an injunction against HTC in the US earlier this year over a patent that converted phone numbers and emails into links in messages, and the US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled last November that the Cupertino-based company had not violated any of HTC’s patents in its own devices.

The iPhone-manufacturer won injunctions against the sale of both the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Samsung Galaxy Nexus last week.

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