ITC sides with Apple, bans sale and import of some HTC phones (updated)

The ITC has issued a ruling in favor of Apple Inc., banning the sale and import or certain HTC phones in the US. The ruling, which was widely expected to finally be handed down today after being delayed twice, finds that HTC violates a pair of patents held by the Cupertino company regarding the formatting of data (such as phone numbers) in otherwise unstructured documents (such as emails) allowing users to interact with them. The ban isn't scheduled to be enacted until April 19th of 2012, giving HTC and Google plenty of time to address the court's concerns. The Taiwanese manufacturer could also simply remove the feature from its phones, though, the ability to interact with such information across apps, such as tapping a phone number in an email to dial it, is an ability most consumers expect their devices to support.

The International Trade Commission did not find that HTC violated two other patents in question, which related to realtime signal processing and would have been much more difficult to HTC to circumvent. Of course, this saga is far from over and we expect these two (along with practically every other mobile manufacturer on the planet) to continue to duke it out in the courts as opposed to in our stores.

You can check out the full PDF of the ruling at the source.

Update: Looks like HTC already has a plan in place to make it all better. Not shocking, but there it is.

ITC sides with Apple, bans sale and import of some HTC phones (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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