Responding to complaints by Apple and Microsoft, the European Commission, Europe's competition regulator has launched two antitrust investigations into Motorola Mobility to assess whether the firm abused its standard-essential patents with unfair licensing conditions and litigation against rivals.
Standard-essential patents are those that are necessary in order for products to operate according to industry standards such as 3G, GSM or H.264. In this case, Microsoft is complaining about access to Motorola's video and wireless patents for its products including Windows and the Xbox, and Apple is concerned about access to separate wireless patents for the iPhone and iPad.
Because standards-essential patents are crucial for all market players, standards bodies often require that they are licensed on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The investigation will look at whether Motorola has failed to honor this irrevocable commitment made to standard setting organizations by seeking excessive fees and attempting to block sales of products from companies that don't play ball.
Motorola is reportedly seeking 2.25% of Apple's sales
of wireless devices in exchange for a patent license covering its
intellectual property, which would amount to nearly $2.1 billion in
retroactive fees from iPhone revenues since 2007. That's before
factoring in 3G enabled iPads. Apple contends this is excessive and has
filed motions to obtain information on how much other handset vendors
are paying in royalty fees to Motorola.
For more: European Commission probes Motorola Mobility over patent abuse - TechSpot News
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