Motorola Mobility Hit With £6.75M Patent Infringement Fine

By Michael Moore

Motorola Mobility has been ordered to pay a $10.2 million (£6.75m) fine for using digital camera technology without permission.

A jury in San Francisco ordered the amount to be paid in damages to Japanese firm Fujifilm in a lawsuit that dates back in 2012.

Overall, Motorola Mobility was accused of using four patented technologies owned by Fujifilm, three of which concerned digital camera functions and a fourth relating to transmitting data over a wireless connection such as Bluetooth.

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Fujifilm accused Lenovo-owned Motorola Mobility of stealing its patented technology without permission, and had called for damages of up to $40 million (£26.4m), but it was ruled that three of the disputed patents were invalid, leading to the final fine being lower than expected.

The jury ruled that the WiFi Bluetooth patent, as well as two other concerning facial recognition, were invalid, although a patent related to converting color images to monochrome was deemed to have been infringed.

Motorola had argued that the Fujifilm patents should be cancelled because they were not actually new or they were obvious compared to previously patented inventions. The Lenovo-owned company also argued it already held a license to Bluetooth technology.

“We are pleased with the verdict related to three out of the four patents and are evaluating our options on the one patent on which we did not prevail,” Motorola spokesman William Moss told Reuters.

Motorola Mobility was bought by Lenovo for £1.76 billion in January 2014 from Google, but since then has performed strongly in what has become an extremely competitive mobile device market, releasing several well-received smartphones and the Moto 360 smartwatch.

However, the company has been involved in several high-profile lawsuits, including a battle with Apple regarding patent infringements also dating from 2012.