Moto X antenna. Image courtesy of iFixit.
A German court has ordered Motorola to stop selling selected smartphones in Germany to do a dispute over the design of their antennas. The company’s flagship Moto X, Moto G, and other devices infringe a patent for “Laser Direct Structuring” that is owned by German engineering firm LPKF.
Everyone knows that the Apple vs. Samsung patent war has been raging for what seems like forever, but would you be any the wiser to hear that Samsung is invoking “Alice” to try and beat two Apple patents?
The patents in question are Apple’s “slide-to-unlock” patent, which describes swiping your smartphone’s home screen to unlock it — and “universal search,” which refers to a universal interface for retrieving information in a computer system.
In May, a jury found Samsung to be guilty of infringing on the first patent, but let it off the hook for the second.
But while Apple was only awarded an underwhelming $119.6 million (compared to the $1 billion it was awarded from Samsung in 2012) Samsung lawyers think they’ve come up with a way to invalidate the whole lawsuit: by taking advantage of a recent legal precedent called Alice v. CLS Bank.
George Orwell once wrote that, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
Yesterday we reported on the fact that Samsung and Apple were sitting down to negotiate an end to the ongoing litigation between the two companies — and unlike all the previous occasions, this time the plan was to make it stick.
Well, one day later, and talks between the two warring factions are reportedly breaking down — as lawyers from both sides express difficulty working with each other. What is seemingly particularly grinding gears in the Apple camp are statements made by Samsung’s top lawyer, referring to the protracted lawsuit as “Apple’s Vietnam” and Apple as “jihadist.”
Samsung was the elephant in the room following last week’s surprising news that Apple and Google/Motorola had come to a surprising agreement, in which both companies would agree to drop all ongoing litigation against the other.
Having spent the last few years waging bitter patent campaigns against each other in court, it seemed unlikely that Apple would be willing to afford similar treatment to Samsung.
In a surprising move, Apple and Google have decided to drop all lawsuits charges against each other as reported by the Wall Street Journal, ending a long court-room battle. The agreement contains all of Apple’s patent battles against Motorola Mobility, which Google inherited when it purchased the company a couple of years ago.
