Last year Motorola brought up a complaint (aka lawsuit) about a specific wireless mobile device technology that turns out to be not so new or "smart". If you haven't noticed yet, when you bring your smartphone up to your ear, the screen automatically turns off, acknowledging that you're talking on the phone and preventing any unintentional dialing. This can be achieved through an IR proximity sensor located in phones that detects anything that comes near it.
There already exists a third party patent for this technology, but Motorola claimed that their own patent claimed in 1999, pertained to modern touch screens rather than "physical push buttons". With this claim, Motorola accused Apple of infringing its own patent. While dismissed at first, the U.S. ITC has decided to review their decision on this matter as well as other possible infringements on Motorola's patents. I think this is a pretty far fetched claim for Motorola, to differentiate patents on mobile phones like this. I'm actually curious how they even got their 1999 patent in the first place when there already was a patent for phones with "physical push buttons", but if they succeeded in acquiring that patent before, they just might be able to enforce it today against Apple.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/19/itc-to-review-decision-that-cleared-apple-of-infringing-on-motorola-patents
It makes sense that Motorola will claim this, because if the patent claim is vague and they did not have the patent for physical push buttons, I guess they may have a case. It does seem like a stretch though.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting...I really wonder what will happen to this case. But like Sumer said, since Motorola actually had the patent, I think they actually have a good case here.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I am very curious about is how Apple will come out in the next 10 years. It seems Apple is at the center of lawsuits with Samsung, Google, Nokia, Motorola all coming after the tech giant. Considering how we spoke about the number of patents within each device, it'd be interesting to know how many patent holders know their patents are being infringed upon and how many are contacted for licensing prior to infringement.
ReplyDeleteThose Google patents! This is after Google donating patents... Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing
ReplyDelete