Motorola Mobility Makes Settlement Offer to Microsoft in Patent Case

In an effort to resolve an ongoing patent dispute with Microsoft related to Xbox entertainment systems and smartphones, Google’s Motorola Mobility division has made a public settlement offer to put the case to rest, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

Under the offer’s terms, Motorola Mobility would pay 33 cents for every phone that uses Microsoft€™s ActiveSync software to avoid an import ban by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on phones that use the software, Bloomberg reported.

Microsoft, however, “questioned whether the offer was serious,” according to the Bloomberg story.

The 33 cents per phone offer from Motorola mimics a per-unit bond that the company was ordered to pay earlier that would have created a pool of settlement cash once the case was decided.

Google announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility in September 2011. The $12.5 billion buyout deal closed in May.

Last month, the ITC ruled that Motorola violated a Microsoft patent for ActiveSync, which is a mobile data synchronization technology and protocol developed by Microsoft and originally released in 1996, according to an earlier eWEEK report. The technology is licensed to a number of mobile device companies, including Apple for iOS.

That ITC ruling affects eight individual Motorola Mobility handsets, which run Google€™s Android operating system, including the popular Droid 2 and Droid X smartphones, as well as the Backflip, Charm, Clip, Devour, i1 and Cliq XT.

As part of the settlement offer, Motorola also “lowered its demand for royalties on products that use Microsoft€™s Windows operating system, to 50 cents for each unit that uses the industry standard for video compression,” according to Bloomberg. Motorola Mobility had countersued Microsoft for allegedly infringing patents on WiFi and video-compression technology used in Microsoft’s Xbox gaming systems.