“In my previous post (on Motorola’s lawsuits against the German Apple Stores), I said that a statement by Apple’s counsel at yesterday’s Mannheim trial made me aware of a discovery request that Apple filed in the United States in order to strenghten its defenses against Motorola in Germany… Apple’s January 30, 2012 brief opposing MMI’s motion to quash contains some information that a lot of people are wondering about these days when they see what’s going on between Apple and Motorola over FRAND patents: the royalty rate that Motorola demanded when Apple asked for a FRAND offer,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.

“The answer is: 2.25%. I assume this relates to Apple’s sales and to all of MMI’s standard-essential patents, though the context is only one patent (the one over which Motorola has already forced Apple, temporarily, to remove certain products from its German online store,” Mueller reports. “Assuming in Motorola’s favor that this was a license to all standard-essential wireless patents, the amount still appears excessive to me given how many companies hold patents on such standards and what royalty rate this would lead to in the aggregate.”

MacDailyNews Take: Gee, ya think? ;-)

Mueller reports, ” I found out (by performing some additional searches on electronic court records in the U.S.) that Apple has recently brought a variety of discovery motions in order to obtain information from third parties — other wireless device makers — that could help to convince different German courts that Motorola is asking for too high a royalty rate”

Read more in the full article – recommended as usual – here.

MacDailyNews Take: FRAND: Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]