“Apple’s quest for an injunction against Motorola for alleged patent infringement could have ‘catastrophic’ results, according to a federal judge,” Jacqui Cheng reports for Ars Technica.
“The comments came up during a Wednesday afternoon hearing in Chicago, where Judge Richard Posner listened to arguments from Apple as to why an injunction is necessary to prevent Motorola from infringing on Apple’s mobile device patents,” Cheng reports. “No decision was made at the hearing, but Judge Posner’s comments show that he would rather force the companies to play nice and pay royalties instead of taking their patent war to the next level.”
Cheng reports, “According to Reuters, Posner described the US patent system as ‘chaos”‘ (and the man’s not wrong). He further said restricting the sale of Motorola phones would have “catastrophic effects” on both the mobile device market and consumers. But Apple’s attorney, Matthew Powers, argued the company doesn’t want to bar the sale of Motorola’s devices. Instead, Motorola could simply remove the technology that Apple claims to have patented from its handsets. Posner didn’t quite buy it—he suggested it could be better if Motorola simply pays Apple a compulsory royalty.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple doesn’t want royalties, they want justice (for once).
Judge Posner might want to read the following quotes before proceeding, lest he be thought the fool:
I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want. – Steve Jobs to Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt, at a Palo Alto, California cafe, March 26, 2010
I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it. We just want people to invent their own stuff. And so if we could get to some kind of arrangement where we could be assured that’s the case and a fair settlement on the stuff that’s occurred, I would highly prefer to settle versus battle. But it — the key thing is that it’s very important that Apple not become the developer for the world. We need people to invent their own stuff. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, April 24, 2012