patent lawsuit

TAIPEI (Reuters) - HTC Corp, the world's No.4 smartphone vendor, said on Wednesday it was already testing new phone models that work around technology cited in a patent lawsuit it lost against Apple Inc.HTC

Apple filed the case a year ago when it obtained an injunction from a local court to ban imports of the NT-K tablet into Spain.

However, according to court documents, the Spanish court has vacated the injunction, saying that there are no legal grounds to block sales of the device.

East Texas is famous for its patent lawsuits, and even though the Federal Circuit had suggested in the past that district courts be more willing to transfer patent cases out of East Texas, companies keep coming up with tricks to stay in East Texas.

Take, for example, the company Personal Audio.

Last year, we covered Paul Allen's ridiculous patent lawsuit against a ton of tech companies.

About a year ago, we were disappointed to see Kodak start to sue mobile phone companies for patent infringement, wondering if this was a sign of trouble at the company.

As we've seen in the past, when big companies start filing patent infringement lawsuits, it's a sign that they're having trouble innovating in the marketplace, so they switch to trying to use the law to hold back competitors.

NSILMike points out that Google has now responded to the lawsuit Oracle filed against it over Java-related patents that Oracle got when it took over Sun.

The response covers all the usual stuff that you find in every response to a patent lawsuit (i.e., "we didn't infringe on any of these patents, and even if we did, the patents are invalid").

Among the many, many nasty things done in the name of patent law is the rather disgusting practices of "pay-for-delay", where a big pharma firm sues a generic pharma maker for patent infringement, with no legal basis, and part of the "settlement" that is then worked out is that the big pharma will pay off the generic pharma not to enter the market with a generic for a certain period of time.

If you own a big tech firm, you aren't Microsoft, and you weren't named in the patent lawsuit filed this week by Paul Allen's Interval Licensing, well... you're probably looking deep into your soul today and asking where it all went wrong.

If you aren't a defendant - which includes AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! - why not? After all, the technology in dispute is, according to Interval, "fundamental to the ways that leading e-commerce and search companies operate today." Dammit, you say to yourself.

Maybe you aren't one of those leading e-commerce and search companies.