Apple gets HTC phones banned

Apple have won a victory in their ongoing patent wars with every Tom, Dick and HTC in the tech world. The United States International Trade Commision has officially banned HTC Android devices from being shipped into the US. The ban comes after the ITC found that HTC had infringed on an Apple-owned patent. Apple had filed claims that HTC infringed on 10 of its patents.

The patent, US Patent No. 5,946,647, relates to the “detecting structures in data and performing actions on detected structures,” which means that the OS (Android) highlights phone numbers, email addresses and other information and providing context aware actions. Technically the ITC hasn’t decreed an outright ban but rather an import exclusion that prevents all offending HTC products to be sold after 19 April 2012. HTC and Google will no doubt work on a fix to overcome this pesky problem.

Sources :

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/20/itc_apple_patent_ruling/

Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5869507/htc-android-phones-are-being-banned-from-the-us-next-year