It looks like in the ongoing battle between Apple and Motorola in Germany, the latter company may have been dealt a major blow as the German courts have ruled in favor of Apple, which means that Motorola will not be awarded an injunction against Apple’s products regarding the 3G/UMTS patents.
For those unfamiliar, about a week ago Motorola was granted a preliminary injunction against Apple’s 3G products which basically covered Apple’s iPhones and 3G iPads. Apple was quick to appeal, and in less than a day managed to overturn the injunction on the basis that Motorola had refused to license the patent on reasonable terms. Now with this ruling, it looks like Motorola will not be granted the injunction at all. According to Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents:
“The judge explained that the court does not hold Apple to infringe claim 9 of EP1053613 on a “method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access [CDMA] signal”. In the court’s opinion, MMI failed to present conclusive evidence for its infringement contention. MMI argued that any implementation of 3G/UMTS must inevitably infringe this patent claim, as opposed to demonstrating that the accused Apple products actually practice the claimed invention. Since the asserted patent claim is centered around the “means” used to generate a number that optimizes wireless transmissions, the court would have wanted to see proof that Apple’s products contain such “means”. The judge clarified that the court would have deemed the patent claim infringed even if the “means” had been program code as opposed to a hardware implementation — but MMI didn’t show any kind of actual implementation (neither hardware nor software), and arguing merely on the basis of the specifications of the standard was insufficient to win.”
More information surround this particular case can be found at Florian Mueller’s website down at FOSS Patents.