Nokia has sued a lot of its competitors when they realized many of their patented softwares and hardwares were violated. This move, suing rivals for patent infringement, has become some sort of a common case in the US as well as in many other countries.
Now it's Apple's turn to show their might. Steve Jobs' company recently filed a legal case against competitor HTC for allegedly infringing their patents. The case concerns the design of HTC's multi-touch Nexus One smartphone for Google.
If the case will progress well, it certainly will not just include HTC, but rather a lot of smart phone makers such as Motorola, Sony Ericson, Samsung, LG, Palm and the likes. Moreover, the rift can even reach bigger companies such as Microsoft and Google, whose operating systems are running on the lot of phones from the companies mentioned.
Google, in particular, is highly connected to the case filed by Apple to HTC. Although the reasons for the case was clearly to show how Apple wants to protect their patent rights, some sees it as a move to slow the progress of the Nexus One in the market. NexusOne is Apple iPhone's biggest rival as of today.
However, why is it that Apple did not directly go to war with Google?
First, HTC is the designer of the phone and that Google is simply the owner of the operating system the phone runs. Secondly, and the most important to note, Google is in many ways a business partner to Apple, and they certainly will not risk this partnership.
Google earns a lot with people browsing from Apple notebooks and the iPhone itself which runs Safari. Apple on the other hand relies on Google features such as Google Maps, Google Earth and others.
But in any case, the body that needs to be criticize for these string of events isn't Apple nor HTC, but rather the Patents Office. It's been said a lot of times that they need to review their guidelines before giving patent rights simply because the patents they issued lands on broad categories, which makes it hard for other companies to create softwares and hardwares due to the broad spectrum of another existing patent, such that of Apple's iPhone.
