US judge dismisses Apple’s patent suit against Motorola Mobility
23 Jun 2012
A US judge on Friday threw out an Apple patent lawsuit against Motorola Mobility, effectively ending a two-year litigation from the maker of iPhone and the iPad against the now Google-owned company.
The ruling comes after Apple this week lost a patent suit to South Korean electronics giant Samsung in the Netherlands. (See: Samsung wins first patent battle against Apple in Dutch court)
Judge Richard Posner of the district court for the northern district of Illinois dismissed Apple's patent suit "with prejudice," which means that the Cupertino, California-based company cannot refile the suit in the same court.
It is for the first time that a judge has come down so heavily against Apple's patent lawsuit against its competitors.
Posner, who had also earlier criticised Apple's court tactics of seeking temporary injunctions against its competitors, had in early June actually cancelled the trail citing lack of injury but decided to rehear the case two weeks later.
Since 2010, Apple was trying to get an injunction restricting the sale of Motorola phones on the ground that Motorola, after embracing Google's Android operating system, has infringed on four of its patents for key smartphone technologies.