German Injunction Ruling Favors Apple Over Motorola For Side-to-unlock Patent Infringement

Add this to the back and forth and the ever growing battles between Apple and whomever they’re suing the pants off of this month. This month the lucky company to lose their pants is Motorola. While Motorola won one of their battles back in November, Apple has skated off with the most recent of victories. Judge Dr. Peter Guntz of the Munich Regional Court ruled in favor of Apple which means that Motorola is now faced with a permanent injunction regarding its use of the slide-to-unlock feature in their smartphones.

Judge Gruntz sided with Apple in its claims that Motorola’s UI element violated patent EP1964022. This is Apples patent regarding its slide-to-unlock software element. You know, the one that they were awarded last year. By losing this battle, Motorola could see certain devices of theirs banned in Germany. Even though this is a big win for Apple it wasn’t perfect. Only two out of the three, the ones pertaining to smartphones, were awarded. The third one was in regards to the XOOM tablet which in his ruling, Guntz felt that this fell outside of the patent’s realm.

There isn’t word on if Motorola will make an attempt to appeal this ruling and we will have to wait and see. This is certainly a big blow to Motorola and anyone else faces similar lawsuits. Like Samsung currently is. As Apple continues its quest to sue anyone that develops anything rectangular and resembles a smartphone it will be interesting in seeing what they’ll pull out of nowhere next time. Who knows maybe they’ll be awarded a patent for their use of the power button. If so, look out world.

source: FOSS patents
via: Phandroid 

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