ITC Ruling on HTC Could Send Apple (AAPL) Shares Soaring...

Will the recent case with HTC be the tip of the iceberg, clearing the way for Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), and others to gain market share?

The International Trade Commission (ITC) is expected to rule on a case to determine whether HTC infringed on two Apple patents. Though an administrative panel ruled in favor of Apple last July, HTC appealed the decision.

HTC shipped 5.7 million smartphones to the U.S. in the third quarter on the back of Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android operating system, making it the largest smartphone company in the U.S., according to data from Canalys research. Should HTC be found to infringe on patents, it's market share in the U.S. might slip from about 25 percent to zero if the ITC imposes a ban on imports.

Other OEM's which utilize Android might suffer the same fate should Apple decide to pursue litigation against other companies.

Although the ITC cannot impose a monetary fine following a ruling, Apple might decide to license the technology to HTC or sue the company for patent infringement.

FOSS Patents summarized the two patents in question, reprinted below:

• U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" (in its complaint, Apple provides examples such as the recognition of "phone numbers, post-office addresses and dates" and the ability to perform "related actions with that data"; one example is that "the system may receive data that includes a phone number, highlight it for a user, and then, in response to a user's interaction with the highlighted text, offer the user the choice of making a phone call to the number")
  
  
• U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a "real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data" (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs; in its complaint, Apple said that this patent "relates generally to providing programming abstraction layers for real-time processing applications")

HTC shares have fallen over 65 percent since the start of summer 2011.

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