Last month, Apple and HTC announced that they'd come to a settlement in their patent dispute, putting an end to all of their litigation against one another and creating a 10-year licensing agreement. That's basically all of the information that the two companies were willing to spill about the deal when it was announced, but now some more details of it have come to light after Samsung filed a copy of the agreement with a court as part of its legal battle against Apple. The document has been posted by AllThingsD and, while it is heavily-redacted, it does provide a bit of new info on the agreement struck between Apple and HTC.
The deal between Apple and HTC gives the two firms a license to certain patents held by one another that is nonexclusive, nontransferrable and non-sublicensable. Also included is an agreement from Apple not to file suit against HTC over a specified batch of products, but it's not known exactly which devices those are. There's a bit in the agreement about the "Distinctive Apple User Experience" that allows the Cupertino firm to enter arbitration over any HTC product that it feels has cloned an Apple product, though FOSS Patents notes that there are some exceptions, like if the official Android specs force HTC to include a feature in its devices. Not included in the deal are Apple's design patents and nine HTC-held patents.
As I mentioned before, the document submitted by Samsung features a lot of information that's been blacked-out from public view, including the amounts of the royalty payments in the deal. The filing does give us a small peek at the agreement between Apple and HTC, though, and it's interesting to learn about what the two firms were able to come to a licensing agreement about. Samsung sought to obtain the document in the hopes that it would help its case in its legal battle with Apple, which will see the two companies meet for a hearing later today related to the trial verdict that was handed down earlier this year. The Apple-HTC agreement can be viewed in its heavily-redacted form at the Scribd link below.
Via AllThingsD, FOSS Patents, Scribd
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