Apple Sues Motorola Over Multi-Touch

Saturday October 30, 2010 5:05 pm PDT by Arnold Kim

In early October, Motorola announced that it had filed suit against Apple over alleged infringement of a number of patents by a broad range of Apple products, including the iPhone, iPad, "iTouch" (presumably iPod touch), and certain Mac computers.

Late Friday, in a seemingly retaliatory move, Apple filed suit against Motorola over the potential infringement of six Apple patents covering Multi-touch technology. The legal documents uncovered by PatentlyApple reveal that the lawsuit encompasses the following Apple patents:

- Ellipse Fitting for Multi-Touch Surfaces
- Multipoint Touchscreen
- Object-Oriented System Locator System
- Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics
- Method and Apparatus for Displaying and Accessing Control and Status Information in a Computer System
- Support for Custom User-Interaction Elements in a Graphical, Event-Driven Computer System

The offending Motorola devices include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Cliq XT, BackFlip, Devour A555, Devour i1, and Charm. The mobile industry has been littered with lawsuits between the major players. Apple specifically is involved in lawsuits with Nokia, HTC, Kodak, Elan and now Motorola. Motorola is also being sued by Microsoft over a number of their mobile patents that may be used in Motorola's Android phones.