A few days after streamlining its ITC case against Samsung, Apple has also performed some winnowing of its infringement counterclaims against a lawsuit Motorola brought in the Southern District of Florida in 2010, reports “FOSS Patents” (http://macte.ch/vNym8). That case is currently scheduled to go to trial starting October 22, 2012.
On Wednesday Apple and Motorola brought a joint motion for summary judgment on U.S. Patents 6,282,646 and 7,380,116, Florian Mueller writes for “FOSS Patents.” Both patents relate to a “system for real-time adaptation to changes in display configuration.”
Mueller says that that the court’s December 1, 2011 claim construction order, which mostly sided with Motorola on the key terms in those display space patents, has created a situation in which Apple says it “cannot establish that Motorola infringed the asserted claims in the ‘646 and ‘116 patents.”
He adds: “Motorola’s part of the deal is that it withdraws its declaratory judgment counterclaims (asking the court to hold those patents to be neither valid nor infringed), but also with a limitation: it’s subject to “Motorola’s reservation of rights to reassert these or other counterclaims and defenses relating to the asserted patents should Apple’s infringement claims regarding the ‘646 and ‘116 patents be revived or reasserted for any reason (including, but not limited to, modification of the Court’s claim constructions on appeal resulting in a remand to the district court.)”
All 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.