Bloomberg are reporting that Motorola Mobility has filed a claim with the U.S. International Trade Commission over several features including email notifications and location based reminders.
Motorola released a statement saying
“We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations,”
The interesting part here of course is not that, again, Apple and an Android OEM are involved in a patent dispute but that it is now Google who have gone after Apple. Google owns Motorola Mobility in its entirety now and so are entirely responsible for their actions.
Google/Motorola is aiming to have all iOS devices banned from being imported into the US and the ITC will make a decision on the 24th of August in this regard. If this happens it would have a serious effect on Apple’s rumoured launch of the New iPhone a few weeks later on September 12th. This isn’t by any means a necessary part of the process and has long been the source of the negativity towards Apple.
Googles other options include defending their OEM’s by attempting to have Apple’s patents invalidated or if they want to defend Motorola’s patents they are more than capable of having their day in court without any product bans. It seems Google has decided to play just as “dirty” as Apple in this case however and that appears to be somewhat of a U-turn on their previous public stance.
Google have always maintained publicly in the past that their patent portfolio would only be used in defence and have been very vocal on their supposed “Innovate not litigate” stance including blog posts here and here. This move certainly appears to contradict that.
gotta admit, i just lot a lot of respect for google after reading this
Why? Fire with fire. Good luck to them.
As mentioned in the article because Google has been trying to portray Apple and Microsoft as the bad guys in all of this for the last couple of years. They have stated on a few occasions that they would never used their accumulated or purchased patents in an offensive manner, this contradicts that entirely and brings Google down to Apple and Microsofts level.
Yeah, give Apple a taste of their own medicine. It’s all a pathetic waste of time and money, nevertheless. All I want to come out of this sort of thing is for Microsoft to lose any claim they have over technology in Android devices, because they are the absolute worst of the worst if you ask me. Die Microsoft, die! 😀
That is highly unlikely to happen, especially since HTC and Samsung entered into license agreements.
i love the fact apple and windows are taking money from android and all this site does is try to make out android is the one that is being bullied….
android will soon pay out more than 70 % on each phone they sell …
funny how samsung is trying to get out of this aswell but nothing was mentioned on here only the bits leigh and the rest choose from the court case…
Can you elaborate on what Samsung is trying to get out of? I’m trying to be as biased in my reporting as possible so any feedback is appreciated
I think you need to re read that last comment Jamie…
Whoops. *Unbiased.
About time. I love how Google are saying to ‘Innovate not Litigate’ just like the next guy, but if theres no fight back then this will never stop.
Google will lose a lot of money over this probably, but at least they are showing that they wont just sit and take the fire constantly off Apple.
I doubt it will happen, but it will be interesting to see how Apple react if their imports do get stopped.
What exactly are Google fighting against here? The outcome of this case will have 0 impact on Apples litigation policy. Apple has never sued Google. If Google wants to help OEMs then they can do so directly in those cases. Adding a new case to the ever growing list will make no difference.
Google tried to “play nice” for the last two years, it didn’t work. now they are changing tactics it make perfect sense to me.
Apple will come out on top, they can play the long game. It saddens but the real problem is the US patent system. Apple are too powerful, I read somewhere that they’re valued greater than Swedens’ GDP! Also that Google and MS combined are smaller. Apple aren’t going to give that up over a few patents. Its sad that Google have gone down to gutter level because I dont think Apple have any new OS ideas just hardware reinventions.