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Apple Secures Win Against Motorola Over ‘Slide-to-Unlock’ Patent

Sad. How anyone can think this is anything but anti-competitive is beyond me. This is not the free market. From

Apple Secures Win Against Motorola Over ‘Slide-to-Unlock’ Patent

iphone slide to unlock

Apple won another patent victory against Motorola today regarding Cupertino’s “slide-to-unlock” technology.

Judge Dr. Peter Guntz of the Munich I Regional Court found that some of Motorola Mobility’s products infringe on Apple’s slide-to-unlock image patent, according to patent blogger Florian Mueller, who attended this morning’s hearing.

The court evaluated three implementations of slide-to-unlock on Motorola devices. Apple won on the first two, which relate to Motorola smartphones, but lost on the third, which is used in the Motorola Xoom tablet.

“That implementation is very similar to what I have on my Samsung Galaxy Note: the user has to make a swiping gesture from the inside of a circle to the outside,” Mueller wrote in a blog post. “It requires a relatively large screen to work somewhat well, but even then it’s not very intuitive.”

What happens next is up to Apple. With today’s ruling, Apple has the right to enforce the injunction and pull the offending Motorola products from store shelves in Germany. But if Motorola wins on appeal, Apple will have to reimburse the company all the money it lost while its products were banned. As a result, Apple will have to decide if it’s worth the gamble.

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To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.