Linked by bowkota on Tue 7th May 2013 21:44 UTC
"The European Commission has accused Motorola Mobility of abusing its standard-essential patents against Apple in Germany. The Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to the company over a misuse of its GPRS patents, which has seen Motorola pursue injunctions against Apple products instead of properly licensing the technology."
Thread beginning with comment 560876
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-11-29
Apple is asking for the court to negotiate a FRAND rate, given that Motorola's rates are unreasonable. They've shown in the past the desire to extract huge royalties for their SEPs.
Motorola claimed that Microsoft's offer still made them an unwilling licensee, despite it being 10x higher than the MPEG-LA rate. So I'd do a lot less listening to Motorola's saber rattling in court and a lot more observing of the actual facts at hand.
Apple has stated that it is willing to accept a court determined rate. Motorola has gone ahead and attempted to enforce an injunction anyway. That is what got them in hot water.
RE[7]: Comment by shmerl
by Thom_Holwerda on Wed 8th May 2013 10:04
in reply to "RE[6]: Comment by shmerl"
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:
2005-06-29
As far as I can tell FRAND does not mean "Any one can take and uses these patents without any form of formal agreement".
Bingo.
This is what pro-patent people - who almost always are pro-Microsoft and Pro-Apple people, funny enough - forget. Apple/Microsoft stole (their words, not mine) Motorola's technology without permission, without an agreement, without paying for them, earned boatloads of money with them - and are continuing to do so.
It's actually much worse than infringing on crappy, insipid and evil software patents, since Apple and Microsoft were fully aware of these FRAND patents (they are part of the standard after all), but yet still went full steam ahead, infringing them without paying for them.
If you were to adhere to Microsoft/Apple's world view, Apple and Microsoft would be huge criminals.