There hasn’t been a lawsuit in the smartphone sector for nearly a month. Surely that must be some sort of record. Alas, like a no-hitter going into the seventh inning, something finally woke up the bats, er, lawyers, of the home team.
Apple Inc. (NYSE: AAPL) has filed suit against Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) claiming that Motorola violates six of Apple’s patents related to touch-screen and multi-touch technology. Apple filed suit last March against HTC Corp., which uses the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NYSE: GOOG), claiming HTC violated 20 of Apple’s patents on everything from user interface to architecture to hardware.
This follows Motorola Mobility’s request for a declaratory judgment in its suit against Apple. In this case, Motorola had been negotiating with Apple to license technology, but the negotiations failed and Motorola asked for the declaratory judgment in an effort to stop the lawsuit that was just filed by Apple.
Apple’s claims against Motorola follow similar claims filed by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) that some of Motorola’s smartphones infringe on Microsoft’s intellectual property rights related to email-on-the-go, managing calendars, surfing the web, and on and on. Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Eastman Kodak Co. (NYSE: EK) are also involved in smartphone-related lawsuits.
Clearly there’s a lot at stake here. Smartphones are the fastest growing segment of the technology business, and there are literally thousands of patents on all sorts of smartphone technology. And for the most part, technology licenses are widely shared, but multi-touch technology is the latest big thing and any company with any claim to a piece of its development wants a piece of the action.
Oddly, Google, which got out of the smartphone hardware business almost as quickly as it got in, is the target of a lot of these suits because its Android is exploding in the marketplace. If Apple can disrupt shipments of Android-based phones from Motorola or HTC or others, then Apple stands to sell more iPhones. Also, just casting fear, uncertainty, and doubt on Google’s status could cause consumers to wonder if they will be able to get the latest and greatest technology from an Android phone next year or the year after.
It’s all about positioning in the market and in consumers’ minds. Most likely the companies will sit down with one another at some point and negotiate cross-licenses for all the patents that exist and that are still to come. Then there’ll be another break-through, like multi-touch, and the lawsuits will start over again.
