HTC has asked the U.S. District Court in Delaware to ban the import and sale of all the products mentioned above and has asked for compensatory damages as well. Because it has accused Apple of willfully infringing on its patents, it wants three times the compensatory damages. Apple did not have a comment on the matter.

If you feel like you’ve read this story before, it’s because this is the second lawsuit-go-round between these two. Apple initially accused HTC of violating 20 of its patents in 2010, and HTC responded later that year with its own suit claiming that Apple infringed 5 HTC mobile patents. Apple won an initial victory in July, with the International Trade Commission finding HTC violating two Apple patents. Now it appears the Android phone maker is looking to broaden its legal strategy by expanding its patent-related claims outside even mobile devices.

But this isn’t new for the industry. Similar stories are playing out throughout the mobile ecosystem, sweeping up nearly every major player in the category. Using patents to play offense against your mobile competitors has become necessary to survive. So too has playing defense, which is how we arrived at Monday’s rather startling Google announcement that it intends to purchase Motorola Mobility, which appears to be all about the mobile device maker’s patent trove.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Johan Larsson

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There’s an implicit trust relationship between software makers and customers in this regard: as a software maker we promise to do our very best to keep users safe and will provide the quickest updates possible, with absolutely no other agenda. And when the user trusts the software maker, they’ll generally go ahead and install the patch, keeping themselves and everyone else safe.

He goes on to say that Apple has violated that trust. Basically, Apple is resorting to near-malware lows by pushing Safari 3.1 on Windows users. This is not a problem on Apple machines because they all come installed with Safari. But when people are using Windows machines and iTunes or Quicktime, it is pretty bad that they must also download Safari. There is a checkbox that they can uncheck so that it does not install Safari.

Photo via John Lilly

John Lilly’s blog sounds like he is shocked and appalled that Apple would stoop to this level. He does not sound like he trying to bash another browser company. He even adds a disclaimer at the bottom affirming that.

In the comments of the blog, Gen Kanai states that if Microsoft did the same thing, there would be an uproar across the internet. It seems as though Apple is testing the water; they seem to be trying to test the halo effect a little too strongly. This is clearly a business practices issue. As of this writing, there are 224 comments on Lilly’s blog.

I personally haven’t heard that much about Google having any complaints, even though they do the same thing all the time with their Google Toolbar. My grandpa has about six toolbars up on top of his browser from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Answers, MSN Live search and probably some others.

This is a new low for Apple. What are your thoughts?

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