“This is going to have effects a lot further than just Motorola v. Microsoft: it could be crucial in the ongoing Samsung Apple battle,” Tim Worstall reports for Forbes.
The Seattle federal judge who recently oversaw a two-week trial between Microsoft and Motorola over standards-based patents handed down a key order today, finding that Motorola won’t be able to use its patents to get an injunction against Microsoft. That means that while Motorola might be able to use its patents to win some money from Microsoft, it won’t be able to get the ultimate reward of a successful patent suit: the ability to kick an opponent’s product off the market.
“This ruling says that you cannot use SEPs to win an injunction barring products from sale. You can argue about how much money you should be paid for them but you’ve not got the nuclear option of throwing the offending product off the market. Oh, and because they are standards essential, you must license them: it’s only the price you can argue about,” Worstall reports. “The end result of this is that Motorolo and Samsung are rather weakened in their cases for patent infringement by others, including Microsoft and Apple. For they’re asserting SEPs which cannot be used to gain bans. This thus rather strengthens, most especially, Apple, who is defending the use of SEPs owned by Samsung while asserting that Samsung is breaching Apple’s non-SEPs.”
Read more in the full article here.
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