Apple has scored a victory in its ongoing global legal war with Qualcomm: four of the eight patent lawsuits filed in Germany by Qualcomm against Apple were dismissed on Thursday.
The Munich regional court ruled that Apple's Spotlight search feature on iPhones and its Siri digital assistant did not infringe Qualcomm's European patents – 1,955,529 and 1,956,806 – and rejected Qualcomm's attempts to claim them.
The patents in question, defined as a “method and apparatus for communication channel selection,” appear to broadly cover today’s smartphone user interfaces. The patents belonged to SnapTrack, which was acquired by Qualcomm in a $1 billion deal in 2000.
This comes on the heels of Qualcomm securing an injunction in December that forced Apple to pull the iPhone 7 and 8 from the German market. The ruling was based on Qualcomm’s European patent 2,724,461, which describes a “power supply for electrical amplifiers,” which Apple appears to have used in some of its models. The infringement allowed Qualcomm to demand that Apple stop selling the older devices.
Qualcomm and Apple are suing each other in several countries, including the US, as part of a larger dispute between the two over technology licenses and cellular modem chip rights.
This week in Munich, the court ruled that the iPhone does not use the screen feature covered by Qualcomm’s patents. In general, the court ruled that because a user must first open an app before being allowed to interact with the app when the phone is in standby mode, it did not infringe Qualcomm’s patents.
The fact that billions of dollars in lawsuits are being filed over such designations is a good example of how out of control the patent situation in mobile telephony has become, with large companies exploiting intellectual property rights to gain market share.
