Motorola announces that they are suing Apple.
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – Oct. 6, 2010 – Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced that its subsidiary, Motorola Mobility, Inc., has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging that Apple’s iPhone, iPad, iTouch and certain Mac computers infringe Motorola patents. Motorola Mobility also filed patent infringement complaints against Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the Northern District of Illinois and the Southern District of Florida.
iTouch? What is that? There’s the iPod Touch.
Overall, Motorola Mobility’s three complaints include 18 patents, which relate to early-stage innovations developed by Motorola in key technology areas found on many of Apple’s core products and associated services, including MobileMe and the App Store. The Motorola patents include wireless communication technologies, such as WCDMA (3G), GPRS, 802.11 and antenna design, and key smartphone technologies including wireless email, proximity sensing, software application management, location-based services and multi-device synchronization.
MobileMe and App Store? This is interesting how Motorola sees it this way.
The timing couldn’t be any more convenient, just five days after Microsoft filed suits against Motorola. Any lawsuits takes time to prepare, Motorola wouldn’t have come up with the idea of suing Apple in just 5 days.
Without looking into the patents that Motorola alleged Apple infringes upon, so far it sounds pretty ridiculous. It is true that Apple came into the mobile phone business much later than Motorola. It is also true that the original iPhone is the first of what most smartphone today look and operate like. Motorola lawsuit against Apple is just as ridiculous as Microsoft lawsuit against Motorola.
In Motorola’s defense, they do make phones with physical keyboards.