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"Perhaps there is hope that Apple's patent wars will come to an end after all.\nIn a surprising turn of events, Apple and HTC announced late Saturday night that they have resolved all of their patent disputes and are now entering into a 10-year patent licensing agreement.\nThe two companies have been fighting each other in courts around the world ever since Apple first sued HTC in 2010 for allegedly infringing on patents related to the iPhone. Since then, the courts have ruled in Apple's favor on multiple occasions, including earlier this year when the International Trade Commission issued a big blow to HTC by temporarily halting sales of the company's new One X and Evo 4G LTE smartphones. Perhaps that defeat made the company more willing to settle with Apple.\nBoth companies suggested that the goal of the settlement is to move beyond litigation and back to innovation.\n\u201CHTC is pleased to have resolved its dispute with Apple, so HTC can focus on innovation instead of litigation,\u201D Peter Chou, HTC's CEO said in a joint statement. Apple's CEO Tim Cook echoed the sentiment, saying, \"We are glad to have reached a settlement with HTC. We will continue to stay laser focused on product innovation.\u201D\nThe two companies did not disclose the terms of the new licensing deal, which includes current and future patents held by both Apple and HTC, but an HTC spokeswoman did tell\u00A0The Wall Street Journal that she doesn't expect the agreement to have an \"adverse material impact\" on HTC's business.\nApple pursued a lawsuit with HTC as part of a \"thermonuclear war\" declared by former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs against Google's Android operating system and its manufacturing partners. In addition to HTC, Apple is also engaged in a high-profile global patent battle with Samsung. Unlike HTC, however, Samsung has won cases in several countries against Apple and has a much greater share of the smartphone market, which likely makes it less interested in settling. Meanwhile, Apple continues to escalate its patent fight against Samsung by filing more lawsuits against the company's products.\nApple's willingness to settle with HTC either signals a shift away from Jobs' \"thermonuclear war,\" or a revised strategy of focusing its efforts on the two big players: Samsung and Google. For his part, Apple's current CEO\u00A0has repeatedly stated that he's less interested in pursuing litigation than his predecessor might have been.\n\"I've always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it,\" Cook said during Apple's second quarter earnings call in April. \"We just want people to invent their own stuff.\"\nImage courtesy of Flickr, BeauGiles."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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