It appears that it’s HTC’s turn to sue, and the sued in this case is about to be Apple. HTC has filed a new lawsuit with the fruit-shaped company saying that they’ve infringed on three of HTC’s patents, two of which were purchased by HTC back in April as they purchased the entirety of ADC Technologies. I’m not sure about you, but I think all this interest in patent cases has gotten a little out of hand – this sort of thing goes on all day every day, on all levels – why all the interest lately? Regardless, this set of suits has been filed in the US District Court of Delaware, Rueters reports, and has to do with iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad as well as iPods and Macs using a certain IP without permission.

In this case apparently HTC is looking for damages, triple damages for willful infringement, and an injunction on importation and sales of the allegedly infringing devices. We can see which patents each of the devices HTC is saying are infringing are infringing, those being 7,417,944 ”Method for orderwire modulation”, 7,672,219 ”Multipoint-to-point communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing” and 7,765,414 ”Circuit and operating method for integrated interface of PDA and wireless communication system” — note here that the latter patent was originally filed by HTC while ADC filed the former two.

In similar news you should be aware of, Apple has previously been found guilty of infringing upon S3 Graphics patents – HTC presumably owning those soon we can expect another round of lawsuits coming through as well. HTC has told us that they will not comment specifically on this new suit, noting “we don’t comment on pending litigation.” The company has told us, on the other hand, that “as a leading smartphone innovator, we respect intellectual property of others and will defend our own intellectual property as needed.” War is brewing.

Update: HTC comments on the suit:

“We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones. This is the 3rd case before the ITC in which Apple is infringing our intellectual property. Apple needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its products.” Grace Lei, general counsel, HTC Corporation

[via SlashGear]