HTC has been having a rough year to say the least, and now the company has received some more bad news as its been hit with an injunction preventing phone sales in Germany. As result of a ruling in Germany’s Mannheim District Court, HTC won’t be able to sell phones through Deutsche Telekom AG as the injunction is likely to take effect later this month. Acacia Research Group LLC, a patent licensing firm from Texas is the complainant in this case. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Acacia had filed a suit last year against Deutsche Telekom over standard essential patents related to voice coding technology, Mr. Rosmann said.
Standard-essential patents refer to parts of standard technologies adopted by the mobile industry and they are often subject to special limits on how they can be used to make money. Acacia had struck licensing deals over the technology with Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., Amazon.com Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. and others, he said, but not HTC.
It is not immediately clear exactly how this ban would impact HTC, as the company does not break out its handset sales by region. HTC is working with Deutsche Telekom to minimize the disruption to its customers while it appeals the ruling.
Source: Wall Street Journal