HTC hasn’t filed its official reply to Apple’s patent lawsuit in court yet, but the company just gave us an updated and expanded statement on the case, saying that while it “strongly advocates intellectual property protection,” it disagrees with Apple’s actions and will “fully defend itself.” Natch. HTC obviously wasn’t eager to divulge whether or not that means it’s going to countersue Apple with its own patents, but we’re sort of expecting it — we’ll find out more when lawyers do their thing in a few weeks. Oh, and we also asked HTC if and when Google would get involved, but didn’t get an answer — we’ll let you know if we hear anything. Full statement after the break.

How do we know we’re years away from a final resolution to the Nokia / Apple patent lawsuit? It’s been six months since Nokia first filed its complaint , and the two parties are just now starting to argue about which specific substantive claims they’re eventually going to argue about. Let’s do a quick refresh: at the heart of the lawsuit is a conflict over Nokia’s wireless patents , some of which are almost certainly essential to how cell data and WiFi operate. As a member of the ETSI and the IEEE licensing groups which oversee GSM and WiFi, Nokia’s required to license its patents to anyone who asks on fair terms, but those terms aren’t set in stone — Nokia can negotiate separate licenses as it sees fit, and it apparently wanted Apple to cross-license its touchscreen patents as part of the deal. Apple said no, and now we’re all in court, with both sides alleging patent infringement in three different lawsuits (one of which is on hold ) and Apple claiming that Nokia is also liable for breach of contract, because it promised fair licensing terms and didn’t deliver. Got all that?

And the intellectual property rollercoaster continues. The BBC is reporting that Microsoft’s second appeal against a judgment granting $240 million in damages due to content in Word that infringed on patents held by i4i was today rejected, leaving the Redmond giant with a huge fine to pay atop its undoubtedly sky-high lawyer bills. In the latest ruling, the judges state their belief that Microsoft was explicitly aware of i4i’s patents before implementing the relevant XML code into Word, which is about as damning as these things can get. Still, Microsoft might be able to appeal yet again, depending on a panel ruling on the matter, and if all else fails, this can be taken all the way to the Supreme Court. Crazy or what? Microsoft loses second Word patent appeal, on the hook for $240 million in damages originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:54:00 EST.

In Nokia’s own words, what we’re looking at is a “piezoelectric kinetic energy harvester.” Working along the same principles as kinetic wristwatches have done for a long time already, Nokia’s idea is to capture the energy generated by the phone’s movements and to refashion it into beautiful, clean-as-a-whistle electric power. By allowing the heavier internal components to move on rails within the phone as part of a “force-transferring assembly,” the Espoo think tank has figured out a way to capitalize on all the small forces of acceleration and rotation that we subject our phones to on a daily basis. It would seem overly ambitious to expect this to replace the trusty old charger, but we give credit to Nokia for even thinking about it. Check out some schematics of how this would work after the break.

Mama always said that some folks just never learn , and we reckon there’s plenty of wisdom to be had from that very statement. Year after year , German police are called in to raid select booths at CeBIT ( and IFA , to be fair), and yet again we’ve seen a booth cleared out at the request of powerful lawyers from a few companies you may have heard of. Word on the street has it that Apple, Siemens and Sisvel were all kvetching over patent infringements made by an unnamed company exhibiting at last week’s show, and within an hour or so of the fuzz showing up, the whole thing was stripped and a hefty fine (€10,000) was levied. Unfortunately, the exact details of who was violating what remains clouded in mystery, but for whatever reason, we get the feeling that something extremely similar will be going down in Hannover next year.

It’s time for movie night and you have several cellphones but no decent-sized TV or monitor. No worries! With Motorola’s “Reconfigurable Multiple-Screen Display” technology you’ll be able to turn that pile of tiny phone screens into one big display. Motorola’s patent filing describes this technology as something that allows the displays of several phones to be “configured to act like one to run applications” or stream videos while “maintaining the same aspect ratio.” Basically, you stick them next to each other and pretend that there are no bezels in the middle of someone’s face. Anyway, any guesses on how many cellphones I need to construct my own movie theater?

An Apple patent worth gawking at, given its grander ambitions for advertising , iTunes and TV subscriptions : It details a way to make you watch ads embedded into video content, like say, a free or cheap TV show. Conceptually, it’s not too dissimilar from what you see with Hulu, actually—essentially, in order to unlock further segments of the video, you have to watch an ad. You know, just like real TV worked, before DVRs! The patent goes in-depth about how ads would be embedded with content that could be downloaded to multiple devices—like an iPhone or iPad—how it’d react to trying to jump ahead of the ad, and gathering statistics about how the ad was viewed or interacted with. The reason it’s interesting, primarily, is that Apple’s reportedly been heavily pitching networks both on selling TV shows for cheap—99 cents—and signing on to an iTunes TV subscription service that would bundle a selection of TV shows from major networks for 30 bucks a month, like say, Gossip Girl from CBS. The networks have been cool to both suggestions, given that TV’s expensive to produce and stuff. Ads, especially ones with detailed usage statistics (and maybe demographics), would help make up the revenue lost by offering shows for a buck, and make $30 subscription a lot more palatable, and possibly even offset the screams of cable operators watching content dance out the door and maybe onto the cloud.

“In this position, you will join HTC America, Inc. at one of its most exciting phases .” Note: The job was posted on February 10th — we just find the coincidence humorous. HTC is hiring… originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds .

Apple’s suing HTC for infringing on 20 iPhone patents, but what will this mean to the cellphone market? According to Eric Von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at MIT, it’ll be bad news for consumers in the end: It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation - that’s what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out. It’s doubtful that we’ll find out how right Von Hippel is anytime soon though, because cases like this one “can last many years, sometimes five or 10,” assuming they’re not settled out of court

Oh, hello! A trip to the YouTube wayback machine shows that 1996’s Steve “Great Artists Steal” Jobs might have taken issue with Steve Jobs 2010, and his patent lawsuit firebombing of HTC. Irony! The comment was made during a 1996 PBS documentary called ” Triumph of the Nerds ,” and looks a smidge hypocritical in light of today’s events. As does this one: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Goodness. If that’s true, then lawyering up against innovative competitors must be the one of the best ideas you ever heard. In fact, compare the above to what Jobs said just today in the press release about the HTC lawsuit: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it