March 29, 2024

Bits Blog: Microsoft Follows Apple With Victory Against Android

A preliminary ruling found that Motorola Mobility Holdings was violating a Microsoft patent with its mobile products.Tim Boyle/Bloomberg NewsA preliminary ruling found that Motorola Mobility Holdings was violating a Microsoft patent with its mobile products.

Another day, another legal win by a member of the anti-Android axis.

Just a day after Apple notched a legal victory against HTC, a maker of smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system, the United States International Trade Commission issued a preliminary ruling finding that Motorola Mobility Holdings was violating a Microsoft patent with its mobile products. The ruling by an ITC judge still needs to be reviewed by a six-member commission, which can chose to reverse the judge’s preliminary decision.

Motorola portrayed the ruling as a victory for the company, since the judge tossed out six of seven patents that Microsoft had accused Motorola of violating in its original complaint with the ITC. But Motorola could still face an injunction — called an “exclusion order,” in the lingo of the ITC — that would force it to make changes to its smartphones and tablets so it no longer infringes on Microsoft’s patent.

The question is how big a headache those changes, if they’re necessary, will be. The Microsoft patent that Motorola was found to have violated is related to the scheduling of meetings from mobile devices, in which other participants are invited to attend and their electronic calendars are synchronized to reflect the meeting. It could be a big annoyance for its users if Motorola was forced to strip that scheduling feature out of its smartphones.

Motorola could also come up with a technical workaround that would satisfy the ITC’s final ruling — a tweak to its products, short of stripping the scheduling feature out. In a statement, Scott Offer, senior vice president and general counsel of Motorola Mobility, said the commission “may provide clarity on the definition” of the Microsoft patent that “will help us avoid infringement of this patent in the U.S. market.” The company also said it was still pursuing patent infringement cases of its own against Microsoft in various jurisdictions.

Microsoft’s lawsuit against Motorola could ultimately become a lawsuit against Google directly, if Google’s proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola, now undergoing regulatory review, is completed.

In a statement, David Howard, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said the company was pleased by the ruling and hinted that Motorola should reach a patent licensing deal with Microsoft, as others have. “As Samsung, HTC, Acer and other companies have recognized, respecting others’ intellectual property through licensing is the right path forward,” Mr. Howard said.

On Monday, HTC said it had a workaround of its own that would allow it to comply with an ITC ruling in the Apple case. The commission found that HTC was infringing on an Apple patent that detects things like phone numbers in e-mail and text messages so that users can automatically dial the number with a single tap.

So far, no ruling in a smartphone patent case has prompted product changes so major that they threaten to seriously undermine a product’s appeal. But with so many more legal decisions to come between Android device makers and the companies battling them, there is still plenty of time for that.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=02bd4d661d6baf19726f3b76a15584ff