Patents

iPhone patent wars: What's going on in Germany?

Apple forced to pull older iPhones off its online store, faces an injunction on push e-mail

UPDATE: Sales of Apple's iPhones resumed Friday. See here.

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It was a crazy day for Apple (AAPL) in Germany.

First it removed the iPhone 4 and 3GS from its German online store -- the first time, as far as we know, that the company has been forced to stop selling a product because of alleged MORE

Why Apple is in no hurry to settle its iPhone patent suits

New analysis suggests the payoff could be seven fold greater if it holds out for a win

In a note to clients issued Monday, Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore lists four possible outcomes of the patent wars being fought in courts around the world between Apple (AAPL) and the Google (GOOG) Android ecosystem:

1) settlement with per unit license fee paid to Apple;
2) a more favorable outcome where Apple handicaps Android's feature MORE

Apple vs. Android: A grueling patent war of attrition

HTC was forced to drop one feature. Motorola may have to drop another. More to come.

Many commentators took at face value HTC's declaration of "an actual victory" after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that it had infringed Apple's (AAPL) patent on software that allowed a user to dial a number embedded in an e-mail simply by clicking on it. That particular feature was only one of 10 patents Apple MORE

Trade commission postpones Android import ban decision

The new deadline in a key Apple vs. HTC patent infringement case is Monday, Dec. 19

There are six more days of nail-biting ahead for Apple (AAPL) and HTC.

A final decision on a closely watched case before the International Trade Commission that was due on Dec. 6 and then postponed to Dec. 14 has been postponed once again to Monday, Dec. 19.

This is a big one.

In the worst case scenario for MORE

Top Android phone maker faces possible U.S. import ban next week

Shares of HTC are down sharply in advance of a ruling on a key Apple patent suit

HTC shipped more than 5.7 million smartphones to the U.S. last quarter, according to Canalys, beating out Samsung and Apple to become the country's leading smartphone vendor.

So there's a lot at stake for the giant Taiwanese phone maker -- and indeed for the manufacturers of all Google (GOOG) Android phones -- in the ruling MORE

Piper Jaffray: Apple is already building prototype TV sets

The solution Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked" could be a $6 billion business by 2014

In a note to clients released Monday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster seizes on remarks attributed to Steve Jobs in the biography published overnight as "another data point" to support a thesis he's been championing since 2009.

"I'd like to create an integrated television set," Jobs told Walter Isaacson, his authorized biographer. "It would be seamlessly synced MORE

An audience with the King of the Patent Trolls

Nathan Myhrvold, the CEO of Intellectual Ventures, has become the face of patent litigation in the tech space. He told Fortune why his business is good.

By Daniel Roberts, reporter

FORTUNE -- The following transcript is edited from a phone conversation with Nathan Myhrvold, founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, often cited as the biggest firm among a group of so-called non-practicing entities or NPEs. Such companies frequently buy up patents without MORE

Why the mobile patent wars got so hot

Intellectual property law sounds like fodder for think tanks and PhD candidates — so why is Silicon Valley suddenly tearing itself apart over a seemingly sleepy subject?

By Daniel Roberts, reporter

FORTUNE -- If you feel like you've been seeing more news about patents than ever before, you have. In July, a consortium that included Apple, RIM and Microsoft made a move on Nortel's patent portfolio, outflanking Google. In August, Google hit MORE

Google gets its hands dirty

Android's purveyor crossed a line when it sold arms to be used against Apple

U.S. patent No. 6,473,006, "a method and apparatus for zoomed display of characters entered from a telephone keypad," has a long and tangled history.

It was originally filed, according to FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller, by a company called Phone-com, which assigned it to Openwave, which sold it to Purple Labs, which sold it to Myriad, which sold it to MORE

Steve Jobs' 313 patents

His name appears on a remarkable range of inventions

One way to take a measure of Steve Jobs' legacy at Apple (AAPL) is to search for his patents in the database maintained by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Click here to get started.

If you look for patents assigned to either Apple Computer or Apple Inc., you'll get a total of 11,112 titles.

Narrow that search to patents that have Jobs listed as an MORE