[JURIST] Apple [corporate website] filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF; press release] Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Delaware [official website] against rival smartphone maker HTC [corporate website] alleging that several of HTC's products infringe 10 patents owned by Apple. The patents involve various areas of technology including hardware designs, touch-screen interfaces, and graphical user interfaces. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs [corporate profile] explained the reason for the lawsuit:

We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.

Apple also filed a complaint [text, PDF] against HTC with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) [official website] claiming infringement of 10 other Apple patents, seeking to bar the importation of infringing devices.

Apple has recently been involved in numerous legal actions over alleged patent infringement. In October, Finnish telecommunications company Nokia [corporate website] filed suit [JURIST report] against Apple alleging that Apple infringed 10 of its patents since the first iPhone was released in 2007. The patents cover wireless data transmission, speech coding, and security/encryption, specifically GSM, UTMS (3G), and WLAN standards. In November 2008, EMT Technologies Inc. sued Apple, claiming that Apple infringed its patent [Computerworld report] for "apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling Internet content." Earlier that year, Apple settled a 2007 suit [CNET report] with Klausner Technologies, which alleged Apple infringed a patent [CNET report] relating to its visual voicemail function. Also in 2007, Apple was sued for patent infringement based on the iPhone keyboard [Ars Technica report].