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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.
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nwcs
20 months ago
Can't we all just get along?
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Mike225
20 months ago
Yet not Samsung because Samsung can do some major damage back to Apple
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likemyorbs
20 months ago
This is getting ridiculous.
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andrew086
20 months ago
This is like trying to sue people for using a touch screen. It's the next generation of input, get over it, Apple. You can't have a complete monopoly on everything.
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ChrisTX
20 months ago
Regardless of OS, Motorola phones are really lackluster anyways.
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Mike225
20 months ago

Regardless of OS, Motorola phones are really lackluster anyways.

I disagree
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Xavier
20 months ago
Are these lawsuit more along the lines of "what can I get away with" rather than you actually infringed on my technology?

After my first 3 Motorola phones went to the grave, I decided never to own another Motorola.
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gnasher729
20 months ago

This is like trying to sue people for using a touch screen. It's the next generation of input, get over it, Apple. You can't have a complete monopoly on everything.


So what is your advice for Motorola then? Motorola suing Apple for patent infringement is fine, but Apple countersuing Motorola means "get over it"?
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wschutz
20 months ago

Apple, Inc patent titled: Multipoint Touchscreen: A touch panel having a transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches or near touches that occur at the same time and at distinct locations in the plane of the touch panel and to produce distinct signals representative of the location of the touches on the plane of the touch panel for each of the multiple touches is disclosed.


This is very lame and ridiculous... Apple has NOT invented multipoint touchscreens... although they have got the patent...
Once again... we have an example of how patents are stupid and useless (at least in US...).
I wonder if I could get the patent for the process of inhaling and exhaling air using biological bags...
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goobot
20 months ago
well apple put a lot of money and time into researching the tec. another company shouldnt just steal it.
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