HTC violating Apple patents, ban of some HTC devices in the US starting April 19, 2012

Whoa, this kinda convinces me that those pre-iPad tablets were pretty good looking! I've seen a few like the ones one the right and have never seen any of the pre-iPad tablets under the "distorted-reality" field.

Back on topic: What sucks is that none of us could influence either side here. We all may be complaining and starting flame wars and everything like that, but in reality, this isn't going to get anywhere. As much as I dislike these stupid lawsuits, I can only go as far as expressing an opinion, no further (unless I was some top exec of a massive company, but I'm not, so yeah)

Agreed, patenting is important, but certain small things should be left open for people to use in order to construct a unique and hopefully innovative large program. I guess there are workarounds for this stuff, but I don't know how that works. I've only been programming for a year and my first thought is not if I'm infringing on a patent, but how to get the darn thing to work for me.

That's the bad side here, small stuff like this is what user takes for granted, and makes the user's life easier.
People saying, "Well this kind of copying stops innovation", hello? It's just extracting a number from text, isn't clicking obvious? Would you rather copy it, then open the phone app, and then paste it, and call it? That is the best way to handle it, and if you're going to say it stops innovation, please, go play in the traffic.

no according to the rules of this forum you can't flame or troll. And there's plenty of that going on in this thread

Wow. Good to see both views on patent infringements.

What's going on between Apple & HTC is that Apple protected a technoloy where you click on a phone number (eg when scrolling through a web page), it then opens up the phone dialer. The same can be done for email addresses - the email page opens up. Essentially it saves you time with the whole process of copying & pasting the phone number/ email address and then opening up the phone dialer/email page.

So are they patenting the concept or the process itself? If it's the process, then I bet one could work around this patent (even though people really shouldn't have to do that), but if it's the concept, then you can't even use this idea?

Someday apple is going to pay for all of there patent law suits...
Like right now because all there focusing on is sueing other companies there loosing a lot of time to fix problems in ios (so ios could get a bad reputation of fixing bugs)
Also there increasing the sales of other devices since they might disappear and the people think they should get it before it disappears (like samsung is happy apple is sueing them because it makes there tablets more popular)

I suggest you brush up on this patent lawsuit topic or actually read the thread before posting again. Only trying to help you here I promise!

But it's Apple. They want to patent anything if it hasn't already been done.

I apologize but there are so many things wrong with this statement.