Post 26 Bad news continues for Motorola with ITC Sides With Apple in Mobile Phone Sensor Patent Dispute

The recent ruling on the patent dispute between Apple and Motorola at ITC has ended in favor of Apple. The ruling dismissed the appeal for patent claims by Google's Motorola Mobility against Apple's iPhone. If Motorola had prevailed, the ITC could have instituted a ban on imports of the iPhone into the United States from Apple's manufacturers in China.

The fact that ITC Judge Thomas Pender invalidated the final patent in the dispute last year did not stop Motorola to regroup and appeal again for the case. Motorola are complaining Apple's violation of U.S. Patent No. 6,246,862 on a "sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device." The patent relates to the feature that a touch screen ignores touches if the user is on a phone call and holds the device close to his head, which is widely used in all generations of iPhone (and in fact, all smartphones nowadays can be found using similar patents). Judge Pender ruled that Motorola could not patent a sensor that prevents unintended hang-ups and application launches when the phone is close to a person's face because of its similarity to other patents on the market. That is a successful use of prior art search by Apple to defend themselves.

In its appeal of that ruling Motorola argued that it filed the patent in 1999 before mobile touch-screen devices were prevalent in the market. The company also said in its appeal that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs himself called the sensor a "breakthrough," though Apple countered that Jobs wasn't talking about the sensor patent directly.

However, the ITC ended its investigation Monday and sided with Apple's arguments that the sensor patent is invalid dude to its lack of inventiveness. And Google would have to overcome two obviousness theories involving "the same patent and found the patent obvious over the earlier-filed Motorola patent in combination with either common general knowledge or another patent." Of course Google's Motorola can still appeal to this decision, but what in chances they can win? This case seemed just to be done for the time.