Some of you might remember that Motorola filed suit against Apple in Germany over several of its 3G patents. Apple did not even bother to file a response to the initial suit which asked for a preliminary ban on the sale of Apple products in Germany as they felt they had an ace up their sleeve and Motorola only sued Apple, the parent company and not their German corporation.

In the end Apple’s attempt at using the patents under FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) failed as they refused initial overtures from Motorola about this in the past and the courts basically ruled that Apple cannot just hide under FRAND after they are caught.

Now the interesting item that we have here is that Apple is trying desperately to gain the licensing agreements between Motorola and all of its other partners for two reasons. The first is to attempt to show the patent is exhausted and that Motorola cannot come after Apple for it while the second is to make sure that Apple can keep the money they owe to a minimum.

Right now Motorola is asking for 2.25%. If this figure is significantly higher than what Motorola is charging HTC, Nokia or any other phone maker then Apple can try to prove discrimination on the part of Motorola. We have a feeling that Apple may back themselves into a wall as some of the arguments they will need to use have already been used by Samsung in legal battles in the same country. It is also worth noting that at this time Motorola is not asking for injunctions or bans on sales to be permanent (unlike Apple) instead they are asking to be paid for the use of their IP. This argument may make more sense to the judges (and to us) which could work against Apple’s strategy of taking out the competition.

Time will tell on this one and we are sure the arguments and counter-arguments will be entertaining to read.

Source Foss Patents

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