S3 Graphics suffered a big defeat on Monday, when it saw the US International Trade Commission dismiss its patent complaint against Apple. Today things are looking no rosier, as HTC has announced it intends to "reevaluate" its decision to purchase S3. Back in July, only a few days after S3 won the first round / ruling in its ITC battle against Apple over image compression in Mac OS X, HTC said it would acquire the small company in an effort to gain access to a portfolio of 235 patents and patent applications. If it wasn't evident already, HTC's prime reason for buying S3 was in order to gain IP leverage over Apple, with Peter Chou explicitly stating that S3's intellectual property would be complementary to HTC's technology leadership. Now that the ITC no longer considers those patents to have been infringed by Apple's software, however, HTC's valuation of the synergistic benefits appears to have diminished.