Apple accuses Motorola of infringing six patents including multi-touch technology

In answer to Motorola’s lawsuit, Apple counter-sued Motorola. On October 29, 2010 the company filed two lawsuits in a U.S. District Court at the Western District of Wisconsin. Apple said that Motorola infringed six patents related to multi-touch technology that was first introduced by Apple via its iPhone in 2007.

Apple’s two lawsuits mentioned names of nine Motorola handsets including Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Cliq XT, BackFlip, Devour A555, Devour i1 and Charm 1. Apple Insider gave out numbers of the six patents:

U.S. Patent No. 7,812,828 - "Elipse fitting for multi-touch surfaces"

U.S. Patent No. 7,663,607 - "Multipoint touchscreen"

U.S. Patent No. 5,379,430 - "Object-oriented system locator system"

U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949 - "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics"

U.S. Patent No. 6,493,002 - "Method and apparatus for displaying and accessing control and status information in a computer system"

U.S. Patent No. 5,838,315 - "Support for custom user-interaction elements in a graphical, event-driven computer system."

Earlier this month, Motorola Mobility filed a lawsuit against Apple with the U.S. International Trade Commission. It said that Apple infringed patents over technologies such as 3G, GPRS, 802.11 wireless and antenna design in its iPhone, iPod touch and certain Mac products.

Apple also filed lawsuit against HTC, another major Android handset maker, over infringing 12 patents. Motorola applied for a “declaratory judgment” at the US District Court in Delaware on the ground that Apple had no rights to sue the company over those 12 patents.

These legal battles show how the companies are fighting with each other to stay on top of the smartphone market which is the major growth industry in the mobile phone industry. Both Apple and Microsoft are threatened by the rise of Android phones. At a recent study released by IDC, for the first time Apple made it to the list of top five handset vendors in the world with its iPhone.