Motorola Inc. on Friday accused smart phone maker Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd. of selling devices that infringe on five Motorola patents.
The complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), could result in RIM being banned from importing and selling in the United States its BlackBerry mobile phones, which are increasingly popular among makers of communication and data-sharing applications.
Motorola contends that RIM is illegally using “early-stage innovations developed by Motorola,” the company said in a statement. According to Motorola, the patents apply to technologies such as Wi-Fi access, application management, user interface, and power management. Motorola requested that the ITC initiate an investigation into RIM’s use of the technologies and issue an exclusion order which would bar RIM from importing the alleged infringing products. (Motorola did not identify the specific RIM devices that would be affected.)
RIM officials declined to comment on the Motorola complaint today.
Motorola’s ITC action was preceded by an intellectual property lawsuit that the company filed against RIM in 2008, and is one of several such intellectual property legal challenges to have been filed recently in the intensely competitive smart phone market. The Motorola lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, contained similar charges against RIM. The case is still pending.
In its ITC filing, Motorola contends that RIM illegally continues to use Motorola’s patented intellectual property, although a 2003 licensing agreement permitting RIM to do so expired in 2007.
“In light of RIM’s continued unlicensed use of Motorola’s patents, RIM’s use of delay tactics in our current patent litigation, and RIM’s refusal to design out Motorola’s proprietary technology, Motorola has no choice but to file a complaint with the ITC to halt RIM’s continued infringement,” said Jonathan Meyer, Motorola senior vice president of intellectual property law, in a prepared statement.
The ITC complaint was widely seen as an attempt by Motorola to prompt a negotiated settlement of its complaints against RIM. While unfair trade-practice suits can take years to be resolved in federal court, such complaints are sometimes settled in less than two years before the ITC.
Other smart phone makers have recently filed similar patent infringement complaints before the ITC. Apple, for example, has asked the commission to block imports of Nokia’s mobile phones due to alleged patent infringements. And Kodak has filed complaints before the ITC claiming violation of camera patents by both Apple and RIM.