Seeks billions in damages and an injunction against the flagship Android 4.0 phone
One measure of how quickly events are unfolding in the smartphone patent wars is the number of typos appearing in Florian Mueller's FOSS Patents dispatches. The German-born blogger's coverage of the "thermonuclear war" Steve Jobs promised to unleash against Google's (GOOG) Android operating system are closely read by all sides in the cross-continental disputes, and lately he's hardly had time to breathe, never mind spellcheck.
"There's just too much going on these days," he wrote in the second of two long reports filed Saturday, "and contrary to popular misbelief (which I've seen on Twitter), I do sleep."
As Mueller sees it, the subject of his two latest reports, a pair of federal lawsuits filed by Apple (AAPL) in two California district courts, are signal events that could turn the tide in Cupertino's favor.
Galaxy Nexus
In the Northern District: In the first suit, Apple is asking for a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Nexus -- the official "Ice Cream Sandwich" lead device developed by Samsung in close cooperation with Google -- based of four court-tested "high-powered" patents that Mueller dubs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Google's decision to keep using one of them -- the so-called "data detector" patent -- in the latest version of Android, even after the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that an HTC Android phone had infringed it is, in Mueller's words, "unfair vis-à-vis HTC..., snubs Apple, and shows disregard for intellectual property in general and the ITC in particular. This is a case of willful, extremely reckless infringement."
In the Southern District: Here Apple is trying to shut down Motorola Mobility's (MMI) legal strategy -- endorsed implicitly and "irrevocably" last week by Google, which is about to purchase MMI -- of blocking sales of iPhones in Germany on the grounds that they infringe industry-standard broadband patents that Motorola pledged years ago to license to all comers on so-called FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. Motorola licensed the patents to chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM) and that license would normally extend, by the principle of "patent exhaustion," to a company like Apple that buys Qualcomm chips.
But in an exchange of letters revealed in Apple's suit, Motorola asked Qualcomm "to terminate any and all license and covenant rights with respect to Apple, effective February 10, 2011."
Mueller writes that "even though Qualcomm may benefit from weak patent exhaustion defenses in other situations because it is a major patent holder who could do a lot of 'double-dipping', it appears that it supports Apple, and I don't think that's just because Apple is a customer. I think it's most likely because MMI's discriminatory termination relating to only Apple is, quite probably, unjustifiable and ineffectual."
"If it's true that patent exhaustion is a valid defense in Apple's favor," Mueller concludes, "Google-MMI is playing with fire here." Apple was forced to temporarily remove the iPhone 3G and 4 from its German online store based on Motorola's FRAND complaint, and now sales of the iPhone 4S could be at risk. The company is seeking damages that could run to many billions of dollars.
Both cases are getting extensive coverage in the trade press -- for example at AppleInsider here and here -- but for their detail, deep expertise and passion, we recommend Mueller's reports, typos and all. See here and here.
It's not enough that Google borrowed the phone's look and feel to make Android?
From Google's IEEE letter. Source: FOSS Patents. Click to enlarge.
It took a Techmeme news cycle for the import of Google's (GOOG) letter to the IEEE -- the nonprofit organization that sets technical standards for everything from AC/DC converters to Wi-Fi networks -- to sink in.
Early reports praised the company for joining Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 9, 2012 6:02 AM ET
Apple forced to pull older iPhones off its online store, faces an injunction on push e-mail
Yanked from the virtual shelves
UPDATE: Sales of Apple's iPhones resumed Friday. See here.
- - -
It was a crazy day for Apple (AAPL) in Germany.
First it removed the iPhone 4 and 3GS from its German online store -- the first time, as far as we know, that the company has been forced to stop selling MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 3, 2012 10:56 AM ET
Shares of HTC are down sharply in advance of a ruling on a key Apple patent suit
HTC Incredible S
HTC shipped more than 5.7 million smartphones to the U.S. last quarter, according to Canalys, beating out Samsung and Apple to become the country's leading smartphone vendor.
So there's a lot at stake for the giant Taiwanese phone maker -- and indeed for the manufacturers of all Google (GOOG) Android phones -- MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Dec 5, 2011 7:41 AM ET
Android's purveyor crossed a line when it sold arms to be used against Apple
Photo: thegreencycler.com
U.S. patent No. 6,473,006, "a method and apparatus for zoomed display of characters entered from a telephone keypad," has a long and tangled history.
It was originally filed, according to FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller, by a company called Phone-com, which assigned it to Openwave, which sold it to Purple Labs, which sold it to Myriad, which sold MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 8, 2011 10:58 AM ET
The world's No. 1 maker of Android devices is feeling the heat on two fronts
Hasty cover-up at Samsung's Berlin booth. Source: AndroidPit
Samsung suffered a pair of setbacks last week, although whether they are substantive or superficial remains to be seen. One called into question its impressive sales figures, the other its legal right to sell devices that bear such a striking resemblance to Apple's (AAPL) iPhones and iPads.
Shipments vs. Sales. MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 4, 2011 6:27 AM ET
In the Harvard Business Review and a 50-minute podcast, a deep dive into what it means
Horace Dediu
Horace Dediu -- the Harvard-trained analyst who writes the influential Asymco blog -- was studying the mobile phone market for Nokia (NOK) in 2005 when Google (GOOG) bought Android, primarily as a defense against the perceived threat that Microsoft (MSFT) was about to do to cellular telephony what it did to desktop computing.
The MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 17, 2011 1:12 PM ET
Steve Jobs claimed that Google "stole" this Apple innovation. Last week, the ITC agreed.
When an iPhone receives a message that contains a phone number or an address -- e-mail, Web or street -- those bits of data are automatically highlighted, underlined and turned into clickable links.
Click on the phone number, and the iPhone asks if you want to dial it. Click on the Web address, and it opens in Safari. MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 16, 2011 7:45 AM ET
Apple changes its in-house legal guard. Samsung wants Apple's outside counsels ousted
Apple's BJ Watrous
On the heels of a Reuters report that Apple's (AAPL) chief patent counsel has been replaced by Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) top intellectual properties attorney (something that, according to their LinkedIn profiles, may have happened two months ago), comes a 20 page motion from Samsung asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to throw MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 12, 2011 8:45 AM ET
Google's Android operating system is the big loser as 6,000 patents fall into enemy hands
In the largest exchange of intellectual property rights in the Internet age, a powerhouse consortium led by Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to buy from the bankrupt Nortel Corp. access to more than 6,000 patents covering key telecommunications technologies, from Internet services to wireless data networking.
The consortium, which includes Sony (SE), Research in Motion MORE
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