“I just returned from the Munich I Regional Court, where Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Guntz publicly announced a decision in Apple’s favor: most of Motorola Mobility’s products were found to infringe on Apple’s slide-to-unlock image patent, EP1964022 on ‘unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image,'” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.
“Today’s ruling is a permanent injunction that Apple could enforce at its own risk (against a bond),” Mueller reports. “The court evaluated three different embodiments. Apple won on the two that Motorola’s smartphones implement. It did not prevail on the third one, which the Xoom tablet uses… [in which] the user has to make a swiping gesture from the inside of a circle to the outside. It requires a relatively large screen to work somewhat well, but even then it’s not very intuitive.”
“On appeal, Apple will presumably try to win on the third embodiment as well since it could be seen as covered by Apple’s patent. But even with the current scope, this is largely a win for Apple that will result in a noticeable degradation of the user experience of Motorola’s products,” Mueller reports. ” Apple is asserting the same patent as well as a related utility model against Samsung in Mannheim, and can always bring claims against more Android device makers in this jurisdiction. Today’s ruling is significant bad news for Android at large, and Google.”
Much more in the full article here.
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