Motorola has taken action against Apple in court by attempting to invalidate 11 iPhone related patents.
Motorola have recently sued Apple over alleged patent violations and have just filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court in Delaware. This seeks to invalidate 11 patents given to Apple and Steve Job's NeXt Software.
This preemptive attack says that Apple has a history of asserting that handsets running Google's Android violate the 11 named patents. Motorola's suit states that the Apple lawsuit against HTC includes these patents.
- U.S. Patent No. 5,455,599: “Object-oriented graphic system”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,519,867: “Object-oriented multitasking system”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,566,337: “Method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,915,131: “Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,929,852: “Encapsulated network entity reference of a network component system”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647: “System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data”
- U.S. Patent No. 5,969,705: “Message protocol for controlling a user interface from an inactive application program”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,275,983: “Object-oriented operating system”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263: “Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,424,354: “Object-oriented event notification system with listener registration of both interests and methods”
- U.S. Patent No. RE39,486: “Extensible, replaceable network component system”
We would expect Apple to countersue, as this is a regular company stance in other cases. Apple are also under pressure from Nokia and Kodak who have other complaints against the company.
KitGuru says: Apple are the target of many cases lately and they have one of the meanest legal teams in the industry.