Apple vs. Android: Apple sues over alleged patent infringement in android phones

Apple suing HTC over 20-odd patents before both the US District Court and the International Trade Commission has certainly caused some chaos this morning, but we thought we'd take a quick breath now that we have the complaints and tease out exactly what patents are at stake here. Of note, most of the patents were granted in the past year, but overall they span a range from 1995 to February 2. Yes, last month. That's a pretty big gap, and most of the patents are pretty dry and technical -- and none of them cover anything like pinch-to-zoom. In fact, you might remember #7,479,949, "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics" -- we blew apart the myth that it was Apple's "multitouch patent" back when Cupertino was making noise about Palm. It's impossible for us to say exactly how this case is going to play out -- just like the Apple / Nokia lawsuit, it could settle tomorrow, or it could last for 10 years -- but what we do know is that Apple's going after Android as much as it's going after HTC. Some of these patents are from 15 years ago and cover OS-level behavior, so it's hard to see how they can relate only to HTC's implementation of Android and not Google's OS as a whole. Yeah, it's wild, and while we're not going to blow out all 20 patents to sort out what they mean -- not yet, anyway -- we can certainly walk through the claims. Let's see what we've got.