According to Bloomberg, Google’s Motorola unit just filed a new patent-infringement lawsuit against Apple with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington. According to this report, Motorola’s complaint seeks to block Apple from importing the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and “various Apple computers.” Today’s lawsuit is only the latest in a long series of recent disputes between Apple and Motorola/Google, but it marks the first time that Motorola is filing one of these lawsuits since its acquisition by Google became final in February.
It’s not currently clear what exactly the patents are that Google is trying to defend with this new lawsuit, but we reached out to Motorola and a spokesperson confirmed to us that the company did indeed file a complaint with the ITC today.
We are still waiting to get more details and will update the post once we hear more, but based on what we’ve heard so far, the complaint will focus on technologies Apple uses in virtually all of its current hardware products. The full complaint, Motorola tells us, won’t be available on the ITC’s website until Monday.
Until then, here is Motorola’s official statement regarding this complaint:
“We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations.”
It’s worth noting that, as FOSS Patent’s Florian Mueller notes, an ITC judge already issued a preliminary ruling in a previous Motorola vs. Apple case and argued that Apple did indeed infringe on one of Motorola’s patents. The ruling for that case is expected to come down next week. This was a standard-essential patent, though, making an import ban based on the upcoming ruling in this previous case unlikely. Mueller also notes that if Motorola won a ban in this case, this wouldn’t affect the iPhone 4S and new iPad 4G, as these use a Qualcomm chipset that falls outside of Motorola’s patent claims.
Given that we don’t know enough about today’s lawsuit, it’s currently impossible to say if Motorola’s attempt to ban Apple’s imports based on the new lawsuit will have more teeth.
