Google Shows Support of HTC in Apple Lawsuit

Google has come out publicly in support of its manufacturing partner, HTC, in the lawsuit filed against HTC by Apple. Apple claims HTC violated 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone. While it's clear this is more about Android than anything else, the suit mentioned some Window Mobile devices as well.

Google, via email, told TechCrunch the following:

"We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it."

You have to bet that one thing prompting this suit was probably the multi-touch feature added recently to the HTC Nexus One, also popularly called the "Google phone." That change gave users the ability to pinch-to-zoom in applications, something that Apple has long touted as one of the iPhone's innovations. It even, in the past, threatened Palm over the webOS implementation of multitouch, but never followed through.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, told the New York Times that it is likely that Apple picked on HTC first because of HTC and Google, it is the "weaker company."

“It clearly involves some form of litigation strategy of picking off the weaker members of the herd first. They can always add Google to the suit later on.”

Clearly, if Apple wins, and there's a good chance of that, lack of multi-touch will hurt the Android platform. Speculation has been that Apple has not sued Palm because Palm has a number of smartphone patents that the iPhone has violated. Google, however, new to the game, apparently does not.