As Apple's Battle With HTC Ends, Smartphone Patent Fights Continue - New York Times

As Apple’s Battle With HTC Ends, Smartphone Patent Fights Continue

Apple has shut down one front in what Steven P. Jobs, the company’s late chief executive, once described as a thermonuclear legal war against Android, Google’s mobile operating system. But a wider truce in the patent battles engulfing the mobile industry is most likely still a long way off.

An HTC store in Taiwan, where the company is based.

Late Saturday, Apple and HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone maker, announced that they had agreed to dismiss a series of lawsuits filed against each other in a feud that started more than two years ago when Apple accused HTC of improperly copying the iPhone. The companies said their settlement included a 10-year license agreement that grants rights to current and future patents held by both parties.

The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, though it is widely believed that HTC is paying Apple as part of the agreement. HTC doesn’t expect the deal to have “an adverse material impact on the financials of the company,” Sally Julien, a spokeswoman for HTC, said in a statement.

The deal was the first settlement between Apple and a maker of devices that use Android, an operating system that has rapidly swallowed most of the smartphone market and threatened Apple’s position in the mobile business in the process. Other patent lawsuits continue around the globe, including far more significant ones between Apple and Samsung, by far the biggest maker of Android smartphones.

Apple’s settlement of an Android-related lawsuit could be interpreted as a sign that Mr. Jobs’s successor at Apple, Timothy D. Cook, is eager to end the distraction and risks of patent fights. In the past, Apple executives had been hostile in their remarks about companies they believed were copying their innovations.

“It’s the first major sign of a stand-down we’ve seen in the smartphone wars,” said Christopher V. Carani, a patent lawyer with McAndrews Held & Malloy in Chicago.

Mr. Carani, though, cautioned against reading the HTC settlement too deeply as a sign that Apple would settle its legal fight with Samsung, a dispute that he believes involves more important patents. A jury in August awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages in a federal lawsuit against Samsung, though Samsung is challenging the ruling.

The stakes in Apple’s dispute with Samsung are far higher than they were in its battle with HTC. Samsung ranked No. 1 in smartphone market share during the third quarter of this year, shipping 56.3 million of the devices, while Apple was second with 26.9 million smartphones, according to estimates by IDC. HTC, in contrast, was fifth, shipping 7.3 million phones and has struggled to keep pace in the highly competitive market in recent years.

The HTC suit, however, was the first one Apple filed against an Android phone maker and a harbinger of future Apple legal challenges aimed at the software. Apple filed patent infringement suits against HTC in March 2010 in federal court in Delaware and before the International Trade Commission.

The suit was the start of what is widely viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google, the creator of the Android operating system. In a few years, Android has become ubiquitous on mobile phones, accounting for three-quarters of all new smartphone shipments in the third quarter, to Apple’s 14.9 percent, according to IDC.

The week Apple filed the suit against HTC, Mr. Jobs, who died late last year, erupted in fury over Android, in a scene depicted in Walter Isaacson’s biography of him. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” Mr. Jobs said, according to the book.

Lawyers say Apple has chosen not to sue Google itself because it is easier to calculate financial damages in suits against companies that are selling Android handsets. Google gives the Android software to phone makers and generates revenue from advertising and other services on the phones.

Apple sued Samsung in 2011. Another Android maker, Motorola Mobility, sued Apple in late 2010, and Apple subsequently countersued. Google now owns Motorola.

While Mr. Jobs appeared to be uncompromising in his views of Android, Mr. Cook is viewed as more pragmatic about such matters. While he, too, has stressed his disapproval of rivals’ copying of Apple products, Mr. Cook has said publicly that he is not an enthusiastic combatant in the patent wars.

“We are glad to have reached a settlement with HTC,” Mr. Cook said in a statement. “We will continue to stay laser-focused on product innovation.”

His willingness to settle the dispute with HTC offers another sign of how Mr. Cook, a year after the death of Mr. Jobs from cancer, is putting his own stamp on Apple. In late October, Mr. Cook shook up his senior management, most notably by firing Scott Forstall, a longtime Apple executive who led its mobile software development, to improve collaboration among departments.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 12, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Apple’s Battle With HTC Ends, Smartphone Patent Fights Continue.