In a previous post, I highlighted how Apple sued HTC and ended up getting nothing but a technicality, which HTC were able to bypass without too much of a fuss. Apple have now launched an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) asking the court to include at least one other patent infringement from the previous case as it feels HTC is still getting away with selling phones that have too much similarity with the iPhone in the US market.
The filling, which was uncovered Wednesday by Florian Mueller, was lodged by Apple as a supporting document in the ongoing Motorola case in which Motorola is suing Apple over patent infringements. The appeal case seeks to have at least one extra patent included in the ban, something that will make it harder for HTC to circumvent. In the previous case, the feature that Apple wanted HTC Android phones banned over was easily rectified by HTC through a software update. But in this new twist of events, Apple want to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for Android HTC phones to get into the US market.
The appeal has to do with U.S. patent No. 6,343,262, which details “a real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data.” The patent had been declined for inclusion in the previous ban but Apple seem determined to have it included or at least considered in any future rulings. In Mueller’s opinion, if this new patent is included, it will make it very hard for HTC to work around this time. He however says that appeal cases take a long time to be resolved and as such, Apple will have to dig in for the long haul, something that may not be entirely difficult given the $100 billion pile of cash they are currently sitting on.
