Things aren’t looking good for Motorola. Right now, the company is in a legal battle over patents with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). On Monday, Richard Posner (the U.S. District Court Judge) made a ruling in Apple’s favor by taking one of the patent rights away from Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc (NYSE:MMI). It was the U.S. Patent No. 6,175,559.
The patent was a method to generate “preamble sequences in a code division multiple access system”. Motorola also claimed that the patent was essential to their 3G standards.
When Apple objected to their patent rights, Posner listened and subsequently through out their rights. He’s been eliminating patent rights and now Motorola is down to their last patent at the trial. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) still has four, a number significantly down from the original fifteen.
Florian Muller from Floss Patents says that Posner’s work is far from over and there will probably be more because patents-in-suits are harder to come by.
Apple and Motorola have been at odds over patents for quite awhile now with the latter claiming that the former infringed on several of their wireless tech systems. Apple says that Motorola took some of their key iOS patents. Underneath the entire mess lies the real culprit behind the battle: Google’s Android. The late Steve Jobs vowed in his biography that he vowed to take down his number one competitor.
This battle between the two companies could continue on for days, weeks, or even months. As I mentioned before, it appears that Motorola is losing ground but it’s still to early to tell what the overall outcome is going to be. It’s easy to dismiss this case and claim that Apple has it in the bag but we don’t know the whole story or what’s going on in the courtroom. We will probably never know, we just have to wait and see what the outcome is.
