What makes the request particularly sickening is that the patents Motorola is wielding against Apple are patents that have been deemed essential to technical standards. Consequently, Motorola must offer them to Apple on Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory terms, otherwise known as FRAND terms.

Florian Mueller, who blogs extensively about patent litigation in the tech sphere writes:

I assume this relates to Apple’s sales and to all of MMI’s standard-essential patents, though the context is only one patent (the one over which Motorola has already forced Apple, temporarily, to remove certain products from its German online store. Assuming in Motorola’s favor that this was a license to all standard-essential wireless patents, the amount still appears excessive to me given how many companies hold patents on such standards and what royalty rate this would lead to in the aggregate.

If every company with essential patents to a standard demanded 2.25%, the end result would be detrimental towards technological progress. Indeed, the whole point of the FRAND system is to allow companies innovate while at the same time compensating patent holders. It’s a nice little exchange, really. Company A gets their patents incorporated into a standard, and in return, they agree to license out said patents on fair and reasonable terms.

So the core issue here is what constitutes a reasonable royalty rate for the patents in question. To this end, some attorneys contacted by the WSJ said that the rate Motorola is asking for is a bit on the price side and “may be designed to either force a settlement or disrupt business.”

A lawyer for Proview Shenzhen, Xie Xianghui, is claiming that a court in the Xicheng district of Beijing is prepared to “slap Apple with a 240 million yuan ($38 million) fine,” according to the Global Times. The Xicheng district administration, though, is refusing to comment. “It is still under investigation, so no official comments on the case can be made yet,” a media officer with the administration states. The China Daily meanwhile quotes Xie as also demanding an apology, and an injunction against the sale and marketing of iPads in China.

At the core of the dispute is a 2006 agreement in which Apple bought the iPad trademark from Taiwan’s Proview Electronics for $55,000, by way of a front business known as IP Application Development. Proview says, though, that Apple didn’t win the rights to the Chinese trademark, since those were owned by Proview Technology in Shenzhen, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based Proview International.

Apple has been forced to remove its 3G iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 devices from the online German Apple store today, following a dispute with Motorola Mobility

…

Update: It appears that Apple has successfully convinced a court in Germany to suspend enforcement of this injunction, according to AllThingsD. It’s unclear at this time exactly why this suspension was awarded, but it’s most likely being provided so that Apple can appeal the issue to a higher court.

As part of the indictment, there are passages describing how DotCom and co were interested in copying YouTube’s videos and putting them onto their own site en masse. Below are emails between two of MegaUpload’s managers, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, from April 2006.

“Do we have a server available to continue downloading of the Youtube’s vids?” van der Kolk wrote Ortmann according to the indictment. “Kim just mentioned again that this has really priority.”

“Hope YouTube is not implementing a fraud detection system now…praying,” Ortmann responded. Awhile later, van der Kolk wrote back that he didn’t see how some of YouTube’s unpopular videos could help “jump start” MegaUpload.

“Well we only have 30 percent of their videos yet,” Ortmann wrote. “In my opinion it’s nice to have everything so we can decide and brainstorm later how we’re going to benefit from it.”

Check out more int he full article.

And of course, there’s also the famous story of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer absolutely losing his mind upon finding out that a top executive was jumping ship for Google. “Just tell me it’s anywhere besides Google”, Ballmer reportedly said.

In short, companies aren’t just interested in keeping the employees they have, they have a vested interest in keeping their employees from joining a rival firm.

To that end, a number of high-profile companies, including Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, Intuit, and Lucasfilm, are being sued for entering into agreements which prevented them from recruiting employees – via cold calling – from company’s that signed on the dotted line.

While this scheme is certainly advantageous for employers, it limits the options available to employees, is blatantly anti-competitive and consequently runs afoul of antitrust laws.

Late last week, US District Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the private lawsuit would not be dismissed and can continue on subject to the plaintiffs amending their complaint and refiling it.

The case is a private lawsuit brought on behalf of employees that mirrors claims the companies settled with the U.S. Justice Department in 2010 following a probe. The companies agreed to refrain from placing “cold calls” to lure workers from competitors, the government said at the time.

Koh didn’t take issue with the allegations about the agreements between individual companies, Joseph Saveri, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an interview after the hearing. Instead, Koh has questions about “how it ties together,” or claims of an over-arching conspiracy between all the companies, he said.

So yes, the matter was effectively settled years ago but some private folks are taking to the courts on behalf of affected employees.

As we reported a few years ago, Apple and Google, for a period of time that began in 2006, had a “Do Not Call List” comprised of employees the other company was not allowed to directly solicit. What’s more, Apple and Adobe as well as Apple and Pixar had similar agreements in place.

Following the US Justice Department’s investigation, the companies were prohibited from entering into non-solicitation agreements that would preclude other companies from recruiting – by any means – employees of another company.

via Bloomberg

Foss Patents reports:

The European Commission just announced that it has “opened a formal investigation to assess whether Samsung Electronics has abusively, and in contravention of a commitment it gave to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), used certain of its standard essential patent rights to distort competition in European mobile device markets, in breach of EU antitrust rules”.

It goes without saying that Samsung is innocent until proven guilty of abuse. But the launch of a full-blown investigation after a few months of preliminary investigations is an important step. This means European competition enforcers have received information, in response to questionnaires (sent to Apple, which may have informally complained, and Samsung) that warrant a more formal effort. As the Commission’s press release states, “[t]he opening of proceedings means that the Commission will examine the case as a matter of priority”.

Not too long ago, we highlighted just why Samsung’s strategy was illegal/

Whereas the patents asserted by Apple against Samsung are completely owned by Apple and unencumbered by any outside obligations and restrictions, many of the patents asserted by Samsung involve technologies that are part of established technological standards.

The significance of that is as follows: When a standards setting organization decides to set a standard for the industry – whether it be for wireless internet, video codecs, or in this case wireless mobile technology – companies can submit their own patents/technologies in an effort to have them be an indispensable part of an agreed upon standard.

In exchange for including a company’s technology in a industry-wide standard, any patents involved in a standard cannot be withheld from competitors and must be licensed out to friends and foes alike on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, otherwise known as Frand terms.

One of the busiest jurisdictions with respect to Apple and Samsung’s ongoing legal dispute is Germany where Apple achieved some success in the past to the extent it secured a ban on the original Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet for infringing upon Apple owned design patents. And just last week, Apple filed two new lawsuits in Germany targeting 10 Samsung smartphones and 5 Samsung tablets.

So yeah, keeping track of what’s going on can be taxing.

But a recent ruling coming out of the Mannheim Regional Court in Germany helps sort out some of the messiness, albeit only ever so slightly.

Last week, Judge Andreas Voss rejected one of the essential 3G patents Samsung was asserting against Apple.

Florian Mueller writes:

The pronouncement did not include the reasoning. While a number of legal grounds are theoretically possible, doubts about the validity of the asserted patent would have resulted in a stay, not a rejection, due to Germany’s bifurcated system under which validity issues are addressed in different fora than infringement lawsuits. There are two reasonably likely possibilities: either Apple’s products weren’t deemed to infringe on the patent in a technical sense or the court believes Samsung’s rights are exhausted and Apple has, by extension, a license. If the reason for the rejection was technical non-infringement, Samsung’s other assertions of 3G/UMTS patents in Germany could still succeed. However, if the reason was patent exhaustion, all but one of the four remaining Samsung lawsuits in Germany (one over two patents unrelated to 3G, including a smiley input patent) would likely be thrown out as well. While a finding of patent exhaustion can depend on technical details that vary from patent to patent, and from product to product, I haven’t seen any indication that the related functionality is implemented by Apple itself as opposed to the baseband chips Apple incorporates into its products.

Foss Patents adds:

In connection with the disputed validity of that utility, Samsung emphasizes an obscure Swedish device that previously persuaded a Dutch judge to doubt the validity of Apple’s slide-to-unlock patent. In the utility model case, the Mannheim Regional Court could decide in Apple’s favor without even having to go into technical details on the Neonode device. In order for the widely-unknown device to be eligible as prior art in a utility model case, the standard for availability is higher than for patents. It’s not clear whether Samsung can prove that this device counts as prior art in this context.

Apple and Samsung are already embroiled in patent litigation across the globe, and as the battle for smartphone marketshare becomes fiercer, so too do the legal battles.

Apple this week filed separate lawsuits against Samsung in Germany asking the Dusseldorf Regional Court there to ban the sale of 10 Samsung smartphones and 5 Samsung tablets. Naturally, one o the devices at issue is the flagship Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone which leisurely borrows quite a few design elements from Apple’s iPhone. Currently, the other smartphones at issue remain unclear, but a quick perusal of Samsung’s smartphone lineup  quickly reveals a large number of obvious iPhone clones.

As for the lawsuit pertaining to Samsung tablets, it’s related to the one Apple already filed in Germany pertaining to the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 which, if you recall, was initially blocked from sale in the country before Samsung made some design tweaks and rebranded it the Galaxy Tab 10.1N.

The two cases will reportedly go to trial sometime between August and September 2012.

via Bloomberg

On this date, the ALJ issued an initial determination on violation of Section 337 and recommended determination on remedy and bond in the above-referenced investigation. It is
held that no violation of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended, 19 U.S.C. § 1337,
has occurred in the importation into the United States, the sale for importation, or the sale within the United States after importation of certain mobile devices and related software by reason of infringement of one or more of Claims 1, 2, 10, 11, 24-26, and 29 U.S. Patent No. 7,812,828 (“the ’828 Patent”), claims 1-7 and 10 of U.S. Patent No. 7,663,607 (“the ’607 Patent”), and claims 1, 3, and 5 ofthe U.S. Patent No. 5,379,430 (“the ’430 Patent”).

The ruling obviously doesn’t bode well for Apple, though it still needs to be approved by the full ITC panel which is comprised of 6 members.

Florian Mueller astutely points out that the ITC, by and large, doesn’t seem to be the venue by which any of the big players will be able to secure serious product bans – though Apple did win a ban against infringing HTC products a few weeks back.

So for more impactful results, companies like Apple will have to wait for their federal lawsuits to go to trial. Of course by then, many of the products at issue may be bit players on the marketplace.

Litigants will need to win federal lawsuits, and all of the major Android-related disputes except for Oracle’s lawsuit against Google include international litigations, particularly (but not only) in Germany. The outcome of those large disputes is likely going to depend on a combination of rulings in multiple jurisdictions, even though most of the major players probably thought at the outset that the ITC, which has tighter schedules than most United States district courts, was going to be the strategically most important venue.