Intellectual Ventures sues Motorola Mobility, again
IV launches another lawsuit against Google-owned Motorola Mobility over patents, the latest in series of lawsuits in recent months.
Intellectual Ventures is coming back for seconds in another lawsuit against Google-owned Motorola Mobility.
The controversial Bellevue, Wash.-based company that's made headlines for accumulating a massive trove of software and design patents, sued Motorola Mobility in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday.
The complaint targets several Motorola phones including the Atrix HD, Electrify M, and Photon Q 4G LTE, accusing those devices of infringing key parts of seven different patents. IV says the lawsuit comes after the company was "unable to reach an agreement with Motorola."
Motorola, not mincing words, indirectly referred to Intellectual Ventures as a "patent troll."
"We're fighting to stop patent trolls' use of low-quality patents to extort money from companies that actually innovate and make real things," a Motorola spokesperson said in a statement about Wednesday's complaint. "We support bipartisan efforts by the White House and Congress to end these kinds of abuses."
This is IV's second complaint against Motorola Mobility, which Google snapped up in 2011. It sued Motorola in late-2011, accusing the company of violating several of its patents covering file transferring and image projection technology. That case is still pending.
The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that Google invested in one part of Intellectual Ventures' multipart business.
Over at FOSS Patents, patent tracker Florian Mueller notes that two of the seven patents IV is aiming at Motorola in this complaint were previously owned by Nokia. The phone maker owned them up until 2011 before they changed hands to a group called Spyder Navigations.
A major part of IV's business includes licensing patents out to other companies, which can use them for legal protection, though it's also made waves for litigating other companies. Wednesday's is just the most recent in a stream of lawsuits. Alongside it, IV took aim at Capital One, which itself is the just the latest bank to be targeted by IV for patent infringement. It has also sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, and others in the past few weeks.
You can read the whole complaint below: