Thursday afternoon, Apple filed a lawsuit charging antitrust claims and "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) abuse on standards-essential patents against rival smartphone maker HTC in a Virginia court. The counterclaim, which involves patents covering the "4G" LTE protocol, comes in the middle of an ITC investigation into Apple filed by HTC. The patents have been described by HTC itself as standards-essential in its complaint against Apple last summer, and claimed in court that Apple devices contain baseband chips that implement the LTE standard, thus proving the standards-essenti
