Taiwan's popular maker of smartphones, HTC, is appealing an International Trade Commission ruling which favours Apple over its new subsidiary S3 Graphics.
The patent spat, running concurrently against Apple and Samsung's ongoing battle, threatens HTC's lucrative smartphone business. S3 graphics, which it has just bought, did win a ruling against Apple's Mac OS X system infringing on two texture compression patents.
It's not quite enough to bolster HTC in its fight. Claims that iOS, running on the iPhone and iPad, infringed on S3 patents were thrown out of court - and it's this which HTC believes is crucial to giving it a leg up.
Our friend Florian Mueller has updated his Apple vs HTC and S3 battlemap, here. He tells us: "It's the normal course of business that parties appeal part of or all of an initial determination."
"In HTC's case," he continues, "the ITC decision is of fairly limited impact if it only affects the Macintosh business but not Apple's mobile device, and if Apple can solve the problem even for its Macs by using Nvidia chips as Nvidia has a cross-licence agreement with S3."
It's another bloody business which promises it won't be an easy ride for any of the companies in question. HTC is close to finding its smartphone business impacted, though, of course, it denies this, says the Taipei Times. The Taiwanese company has reassured customers and investors that the Evo 3D will go ahead for sale in Europe, amid reports that it will be blocked as a result of Apple's persistent disruptive behaviour.
Apple really is going in all guns blazing to make sure it has an edge on the competitors doing their very best to bite at its heels. HTC has publicly said that it's ready to fight to the bitter end.