“Yesterday Apple filed a summary judgment motion with the United States District Court for the Southern District of California (where Qualcomm is based) that is a major threat to Google’s (Motorola Mobility’s) ability to seek U.S. patent injunctions or import bans against Apple over cellular standard-essential patents (SEPs) regardless of what will or will not happen on the FRAND contract front between these companies,” Florian Müller writes for FOSS Patents.
“In practical terms, if its products using Qualcomm chips (and those which used other baseband chips, such as the iPhone 4, have been discontinued) were found licensed (which involves multiple considerations including the one relevant to Apple’s motion), Apple wouldn’t even have to win its appeal of a dismissed Wisconsin FRAND obligations case or (in the alternative to a successful appeal) bring a new FRAND determination action to preclude Google from the pursuit of injunctions under the framework laid out by the FTC-Google settlement,” Müller writes. “Motorola would be unable to seek any remedy (injunctive or monetary) based on cellular SEPs against Apple products coming with Qualcomm baseband chips if Apple succeeds with a patent exhaustion defense.”
Read more in the full article here.
Yea, what he said.
In other words…
If the Court finds that Apple already paid a license to use the hardware, any claims by Motorola/Google against Apple would be rendered invalid.
Yes, exactly. I never understood why any company purchasing a company’s already licensed chips would have to pay an additional fee to use those chips. In this case, Qualcomm had already paid the license fee to embed the SEP patent technology into their chips. It made no sense to then require Qualcomm’s customers to pay for that license again just to use the chips.
Keep turning the screws, Apple. Slowly but surely.
This also goes back to the other issue we are seeing. Where Apple licenses a technology IE In app purchases, and then the users of that tech get taken to court. Once licenced twice charged seams to be the rule.
I remember hearing a lot of complaining on this forum about Apple legal. Some of it may have been warranted, but most of it was just premature. Even when you are in the right, you don’t always win. And even when you do win, it sometimes takes years. You have to have patience when you are dealing with the legal system. But it appears to me that Apple’s wins are beginning to stack up.
I sure hope so KingMel.