Apple Burned $100 Million Against HTC For Almost Nothing?

The tech giant Apple has reportedly burned $100 million against HTC in the first round of the legal battle between them, Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons wrote, Monday, on his blog.

An anonymous source close to the development gave Lyons the number. Who knows if it's true, but if so, Apple didn't get a lot for its money, Lyons wrote.

The Cupertino-based company launched the legal battle against HTC in February, 2010. Apple had asked the International Trade Commission (ITC) to stop HTC importing its devices into the U.S.

The case started out with 84 claims based on 10 patents, but by the time the case went to a judge, only four patents were disputed.

The final ruling was that one patent was completely invalid because of prior art. About two other patents, the ruling was that HTC didn't infringe them. Much worse, Apple itself hadn't used those patents in its own products. Accordingly, the judge ruled that Apple had no right to seek injunction based on them.

Only one was proved to infringe Apple's patent. However, that's a trivial victory for the tech giant, who burned $100 million in the process.

Moreover, the infringement only involved a tiny software feature. HTC can resolve the problem by removing that feature from the phones it sells in the U. S. or find another way to implement that feature.

If the purported number is true, it's not easy to imagine how much Apple could have spent on fighting against other Android smartphone makers, including Motorola and Samsung.

Of course, Apple has enough cash reserve to afford the legal battles. So it would be inappropriate to say whether the victory was worth the expense.

And let's not forget that Apple co-founder Steve Job had once vowed to stage a thermonuclear war on Android smartphone with his last dying breath and every penny Apple had in the bank, as the tech genius believed the rival has committed a grand theft of the iPhone's operating system.

I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong, Jobs told the biographer Walter Isaacson. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

According to Isaacson's record, when Jobs once met with Google's Eric Schmidt in Palo Alto, California, the creative genius told Schmidt that I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want.