[JURIST] Digital security company Gemalto [corporate website] announced Monday that it has filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF; press release] against HTC, Samsung Electronics, Motorola and Google [corporate websites], as well as some of those companies’ US subsidiaries, based on the use and sale of the Android operating system and the Dalvik Virtual Machine [product websites], which Gemalto claims infringe on a patent held by the company. In its press release, Gemalto said that the technology at issue was developed in its Dallas office in the late 1990s. The complaint, filed in the US District Court of the Eastern District of Texas [official website], alleges that the defendants are violating federal law [35 USC § 271 text] by using the Android system, encouraging programmers to use the operating system and selling mobile devices that use applications created by the Android system. Gemalto asked the court to enjoin the defendants from infringing on its patents as well as unspecified damages.

In July, patent holding company NTP sued half a dozen smart phone makers [JURIST report] in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [official website] including Apple [corporate website], HTC, Google and Motorola, over a patent related to delivering e-mail to wireless phones. In June, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) [official website] launched an investigation [JURIST report] into allegations by HTC accusing Apple of patent infringement on its portable electronic devices. HTC filed a complaint with the ITC in May [JURIST report] claiming that Apple had infringed on five of HTC’s patents, and is seeking an exclusion order and a cease and desist order, which would ban Apple’s importation of iPhones, iPads and iPods. In March, Apple filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against HTC in the US District Court for the District of Delaware [official website] alleging that several of HTC’s products infringe 10 patents owned by Apple. Apple also filed a complaint [text, PDF] against HTC with the ITC claiming infringement of 10 other Apple patents, seeking to bar the importation of infringing devices. Last 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.