Another day, another lawsuit. Apple sued Motorola Mobility in a U.S. court on Friday in an attempt to stop Motorola from asserting some patent claims against Apple in Germany, reports “Reuters” (http://macte.ch/lJ1tH).
The suit, filed in a San Diego federal court, argues that Motorola’s German lawsuit against Apple breaches terms of a patent licensing agreement between Motorola and Qualcomm. Earlier this week Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court in Germany announced that a Motorola Mobility lawsuit over a patent declared essential to the 3G/UMTS wireless telecommunications standard has been dismissed, notes “FOSS Patents” (http://macte.ch/vyg1L).
The judge explained that the court doesn’t hold Apple to infringe claim nine of EP1053613 on a “method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access [CDMA] signal”. In the court’s opinion, MMI failed to present conclusive evidence for its infringement contention, “FOSS Patents” notes.
This is part of an ongoing battle between the two companies. Apple has previously alleged that Motorola infringes 24 of its patents (21 of them with Android-based phones, the remaining three with set-top boxes and DVRs), while Motorola previously asserted 18 patents against a variety of Apple products (mostly but not exclusively iPhone, iPad and iPod). Litigation between the two companies has taken place in several different federal courts.
In November 2010 Apple sued Motorola, alleging that the company’s smartphone lineup and the operating software it uses infringe on the iPhone-maker’s intellectual property. The two lawsuits came after Motorola sued Apple in October 2010 for patent infringement. Motorola claims that Apple’s iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and certain Mac computers infringe Motorola patents.