ITC Judge Finds HTC in Violation of Two Apple Patents

An ITC judge has found HTC in violation of two Apple patents which appear to be at the core of Android and are likely infringed by all Android devices, according to FOSS Patents.

I have looked at those patents before and they appear to be very fundamental. They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android. It's telling that those two patents are also at issue between Apple and Motorola (and the '263 patent was also used by Apple against Nokia).

The two patents infringed on are:
● U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data"


● U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a "real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data" (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs...)

This decision by an administrative law judge has yet to be reviewed by the six-member commission. The commission has the power to ban imports into the U.S.

Apple has also filed a second ITC complaint against HTC which claims they infringe on other patents as well.

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