Motorola Mobility sues Apple

[Posted October 6, 2010 by corbet]

The mobile telephony patent suits continue: today's lawsuit is Motorola Mobility v. Apple. "Overall, Motorola Mobility's three complaints include 18 patents, which relate to early-stage innovations developed by Motorola in key technology areas found on many of Apple's core products and associated services, including MobileMe and the App Store. The Motorola patents include wireless communication technologies, such as WCDMA (3G), GPRS, 802.11 and antenna design, and key smartphone technologies including wireless email, proximity sensing, software application management, location-based services and multi-device synchronization." The list of specific patents involved does not appear to be available yet.

Motorola Mobility sues Apple

Posted Oct 6, 2010 21:56 UTC (Wed) by pranith (subscriber, #53092) [Link] (2 responses)

Is this a classic case of Mutually Assured Destruction?

Companies are stockpiling patents for such scenarios.
You sue me, I sue you.

Motorola Mobility sues Apple

Posted Oct 7, 2010 1:02 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

The problem with patent nukes is that, unlike real ones, the destruction is not immediately apparent.

Or maybe it's just a warning

Posted Oct 7, 2010 2:16 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Maybe the primary purpose of all this missile-firing between mega corps is to signal to any newcomers that unless they've the cash and the lawyers to play the patent game, they shouldn't even think about entering this lucrative market. Helps keeps prices artificially high.

Motorola Mobility sues Apple

Posted Oct 6, 2010 22:07 UTC (Wed) by TeDiouS (guest, #67602) [Link] (3 responses)

Are they sure they want to use this one: "[...]antenna design[...]"?

antenna design

Posted Oct 6, 2010 22:25 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (2 responses)

"Not only does your antenna design suck, but it's actually *our* sucky antenna design!"

antenna design

Posted Oct 6, 2010 23:25 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh come on. You only have antenna problems if you decide to hold your iPhone.

antenna design

Posted Oct 7, 2010 11:58 UTC (Thu) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

Hmm and here I was deciding to hold my horses.

Motorola Mobility sues Apple

Posted Oct 6, 2010 22:46 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (6 responses)

Surely all of these patent suits must be the sign of progress ;-)

Progress

Posted Oct 7, 2010 2:08 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (5 responses)

helpful diagram: Whos Suing Whom In The Telecoms Trade? at Information is Beautiful.

Progress

Posted Oct 7, 2010 2:15 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Hilarious! Looks a lot like a scenario from a nuclear war - missiles flying left right and centre.

Progress

Posted Oct 7, 2010 10:05 UTC (Thu) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link] (3 responses)

Another graph representation of it at Ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/motorola-asks-i...

Progress

Posted Oct 7, 2010 17:01 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

Holy cow is Nokia litigious. I had no idea! Great graph.

These are not just IP issues though

Posted Oct 7, 2010 18:47 UTC (Thu) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] (1 responses)

To be fair to Nokia, three of those "arrows" seem to be about the LCD price fixing that the major LCD manufacturers have already admitted to various regulators... I think lumping that sort of thing in the graph is not useful -- at least the graph no longer paints a picture of the 'Mutually Assured IP Destruction" that some other posters referred to.

These are not just IP issues though

Posted Oct 14, 2010 8:27 UTC (Thu) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

The LCD pricefixing lawsuit is actually 5 arrows of that chart - Hitachi, LG, Samsung, Sharp, and Toshiba. That leaves three lawsuits from nokia.

qualcomm <-> nokia cdma patent case
nokia <-> apple spat over ui and gsm
nokia <-> motorola not sure about this one, i guess an old case?

Motorola Mobility sues Apple

Posted Oct 7, 2010 19:03 UTC (Thu) by grantma (subscriber, #5225) [Link]

Looks like the Software Patent Mutually Assured Destruction is slowly gathering speed. The warning descriptions of this (by FSF and EFF?) would imply a snowball effect (maybe quite slow) happening before everyone gets mired to bankruptcy.