One of the longer-lasting lawsuits related to the smartphone patent wars wrapped up yesterday when a San Francisco jury found Motorola liable for infringing a Fujifilm patent, ordering the company to pay $10.2 million. It was a mixed verdict (PDF), with the jury deciding to invalidate three other Fujifilm patents that were brought to bear.
The case is just one of a complex thicket of patent lawsuits that sprang up around 2010, with pure licensing companies ("patent trolls"), vigorous competitors, and has-beens all lobbing patent accusations over smartphone technology at one another.
Fujifilm v. Motorola, filed in 2012, is one of the only cases from the heyday of what became called the "smartphone patent wars" to actually reach a jury. Fujifilm was one of several combatants in those skirmishes that had no product of its own in the smartphone market, but hoped its patents would still enable it to wring some profits from the suit. Two other companies that were titans of industry in the pre-digital age, Kodak and Technicolor, embraced similar strategies around the same time.
By seeing the case through trial and delivering an unsatisfying Pyrrhic victory to its opponent, Motorola will send a message that it's no easy mark. Even if Fujifilm ultimately collects $10 million, it may well have burned up half of that in legal fees. Fujifilm lawyers had asked the jury for $40 million, and the final verdict suggests a panel that didn't think too much of their case, since a win of 25 percent is nearly a loss on damages.
A Motorola spokesperson told Reuters it's pleased with the decision to invalidate three patents, and the company is "evaluating our options on the one patent on which we did not prevail."
The patent found infringed was No. 6,144,763, which describes a method of converting color images to monochrome. The accused devices included Motorola phones and tablets with various Qualcomm, Nvidia, and OMAP 3 and 4 chipsets.
The invalidated patents included numbers 7,327,886 and 8,306,285, which relate to facial-detection technology; and 6,915,119, which relates to Wi-Fi-Bluetooth. At trial, Motorola had argued it was already licensed the '119 patent under an earlier Bluetooth patent license, and the jury agreed with Moto on two out of three claims. The decision to invalidate the '119 patent makes the license a moot point, however.
The trial began April 20, and the jury returned its verdict late yesterday.
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