Apple Inc. was handed a legal victory that is bad news for rival Google Inc., as a U.S. trade agency ruled that some HTC Corp. smartphones that use the Internet company's Android software infringe an Apple patent. According to the Wall St Journal HTC said it would soon remove an infringing feature from its phones. Above, shoppers view HTC phones in a Taipei, Taiwan, store last week.
The U.S. International Trade Commission on Monday ordered HTC by April to stop importing handsets that infringe the patent. The Taiwanese company said it would remove the feature found to violate Apple's patent, a move that should avoid disruption to its U.S. business.
Apple is tangling over intellectual property with multiple competitors around the world, in large part seeking to hobble rivals using Android-powered smartphones from taking a larger share of the business. The long-awaited ruling by the ITC is one of the first high-profile decisions in Apple's home market.
The ITC's decision narrowed an earlier finding that HTC was infringing multiple claims of two separate patents. Instead, it found that some HTC smartphones using Android violated only two claims of one Apple patent related to extracting information such as phone numbers from emails and doing something with the information, such as making a phone call. That invention, sometimes described as covering "data tapping," allows users to grab data embedded in an unstructured form, like an address, and use it in another phone application, such as mapping.
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