Google’s Motorola Mobility subsidiary today won a ruling in a German court that its phones do not infringe a Microsoft patent. Although Motorola has lost other cases involving different patents to Microsoft, the win is good news for Google as it tries to avoid paying Microsoft for the right to license its patents.
Microsoft has struck patent licensing deals with virtually every major Android hardware maker except Motorola. The two companies have sued each other over patents in multiple countries including the US and Germany.
According to the IDG News Service, Microsoft was denied another sales ban on Motorola products when a regional court in Mannheim ruled that Motorola did not infringe a “patent that describes a radio interface layer that provides a level of abstraction between the radio and software on a cell phone.” The patent “allows applications on the phone to access the phonebook entries, restrict access to data and access file and message storage among many other functions.”
In the US, Microsoft has already won an import ban on some Motorola Android devices, and previously won injunctions against Motorola in Germany for patents related to SMS, the FAT file system, and a method of handling communication between a keyboard and an application, the IDG News Service noted.
Motorola, which is facing steep job cuts at the hands of its new owner, has demanded that Microsoft pay patent licensing fees for sales of Windows PCs and Xbox 360 consoles.
Microsoft put a positive spin on its loss today. “This decision does not impact multiple injunctions Microsoft has already been awarded and has enforced against Motorola products in Germany," Microsoft said in a statement e-mailed to news outlets. "It remains that Motorola is broadly infringing Microsoft's intellectual property, and we hope it will join the vast majority of Android device makers by licensing Microsoft's patents."
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