Motorola Mobility fails to win 3G/UMTS vs Apple

February 11, 2012

Winning streak ends: Motorola Mobility fails to win 3G/UMTS-based injunction against Apple in Germany

Apple's Mannheim jinx has been broken: this morning, Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court announced that a Motorola Mobility lawsuit over a patent declared essential to the 3G/UMTS wireless telecommunications standard has been dismissed.

The judge explained that the court does not hold Apple to infringe claim 9 of EP1053613 on a "method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access [CDMA] signal". In the court's opinion, MMI failed to present conclusive evidence for its infringement contention. MMI argued that any implementation of 3G/UMTS must inevitablyinfringe this patent claim, as opposed to demonstrating that the accused Apple products actually practice the claimed invention. Since the asserted patent claim is centered around the "means" used to generate a number that optimizes wireless transmissions, the court would have wanted to see proof that Apple's products contain such "means". The judge clarified that the court would have deemed the patent claim infringed even if the "means" had been program code as opposed to a hardware implementation -- but MMI didn't show any kind of actual implementation (neither hardware nor software), and arguing merely on the basis of the specifications of the standard was insufficient to win....

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/winning-streak-ends-motorola-mobility.html