Microsoft vs. Motorola – Second Lawsuit

Little after a month from the first lawsuit against Motorola for smartphone patents, Microsoft is filing charges again, this time for wireless and video coding patents that are used by the Xbox team.

Mary Jo Foley reports that yesterday, Microsoft sued Motorola for asking “excessive and discriminatory” royalties for some of the patents used in the Xbox 360.

The Redmond-based company says that there are contractual clauses that bound Motorola to agreements made with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

They stipulate that the patents should be licensed under “reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions”, and apparently Motorola hasn’t done so, whence the lawsuit.

A Microsoft spokesperson made the following statement on its action:

“Microsoft filed an action today in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola, Inc. for breach of Motorola’s contractual commitments to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to license identified patents related to wireless and video coding technologies under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions.

“Those commitments are designed to benefit all parties that rely upon these standards, and Microsoft has been harmed by Motorola’s failure to honor them in recent demand letters seeking royalties from Microsoft.”

The last time Microsoft sued Motorola was on October 1, on claims that Motorola was infringing on a handful Microsoft smartphone-related patents.

The eight IP in question, are, according to Microsoft, “OS-related and (related to) Exchange ActiveSync.”

Microsoft stressed this fact in both its US District Court and International Trade Commission complaints and added that the patents are all used in Motorola’s Android smartphones.

This is the second legal procedure against Motorola in the past six weeks.

The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox, and it competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.