Motorola Wins Injunction Against Apple’s iCloud In Germany

Motorola Mobility has scored another victory in its ongoing patent war against Apple this morning as a German court awarded it a permanent injunction against Apple’s iCloud.

As Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents reports, Apple has removed all models of iPhone (bar the iPhone 4S) and iPad from their German online store. However, the decision by the Cupertino company is belived to be related to a preliminary injunction granted to Motorola last December rather than the decision delivered today against Apple Sales International, Apple’s Ireland-based European sales organisation.

The expenses of victory

Apple’s decision to take down certain products only affects the German market. It is understood that Motorola paid a €100 million (£83m) bond to enforce December’s injuction, the same fee that would have been expected had it instead enforced today’s court judgement. Apple had argued that €2 billion (£1.7bn) would be a more appropriate amount.

As the ruling from this morning is only ‘preliminarily enforceable’, Apple may yet appeal against the decision. A premature enforcement by Motorola and a successful appeal by Apple could result in the former paying out potentially high damages.

“Even if the risk is in the billions of Euros, there is so much at stake in this dispute that I think Motorola might want to seek enforcement at some stage (particularly if Google, with its war chest in the tens of billions of dollars, gets to acquire it),” commented Mueller.

The patent that the German court judged iCloud infringed upon concerned a “multiple pager status synchronization system and method”. Enforcement of the injunction would require Apple engineers to modify their devices to prevent iCloud access in Germany.

This particular patent victory comes a week after Motorola filed another lawsuit against Apple in Florida for infringements on wireless antennas, messaging and filtering technology and various other software copyrights. The case against Apple Inc was allegedly signed off by Google, who hope to complete their acquisition of Motorola this year.