Apple Wins Skirmish With Motorola on the German Front

Motorola Mobility’s recent run of legal victories against Apple was broken today when a German court ruled in Cupertino’s favor in one of the companies’ innumerable lawsuits against one another.

On Friday, Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court ruled that Motorola failed to prove conclusively that Apple had infringed its European Patent 1053613, which covers a “method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal.” Motorola had argued that the invention described by that ridiculous mountain range of a phrase was essential to 3G/UTMS wireless telecommunications and that Apple had de facto infringed on it by producing 3G phones. But the technology in question has not been declared essential by any standards organization, only by Motorola itself, which was unable to convince Voss that Apple products actually used it.

“[Motorola Mobility] argued that any implementation of 3G/UMTS must inevitably infringe this patent claim, as opposed to demonstrating that the accused Apple products actually practice the claimed invention,” Florian Mueller explains over at FOSS Patents. “… [But it] 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.”

So, a significant win for Apple, which has lost to Motorola twice now in the same court. That said, as Motorola itself has observed “it only takes one bullet to kill,” and there are many more battles to fight in this seemingly interminable IP war.