Motorola's bid to sink Windows, XBoxes sales snubbed Microsoft has won its fight in the US to stop Motorola Mobility from enforcing a banning order on Windows and XBox sales that a German court may award the phone-maker. Redmond had asked a court in Seattle to prevent Motorola from using an injunction, backed by patents for the H.264 video codec, to stop Microsoft from selling …
Well, if we're getting technical... "is kaput" is subordinate to "US Judge rules [that]", so you'd have to push the verb to the end, and say "kaput ist" instead.
Now, just change "rulen" to "hat gerult" (as the action has been completed), and that sentence will be a bastardised mashing of two different languages, that is nicely incomprehensible to both German and English speakers alike... just like a depressing amount of recent German marketing slogans :(
I mean how? A judge in the US basically decides that a ban which might be ruled on by a judge in another country isn't actually valid...
Be interesting to see how the German legal system responds.. maybe they'll decide that rulings made by US judges against German citizens for things like copyright infringement arent actually enforceable. Or maybe they'll find the US legal system in contempt
After reading the article and a few others, it seems the US court is ordering Motorola not to use the German legal system to block sales of Microsoft gear in Germany.
The US judge doesn't expect his ruling to have any effect on what happens in Germany.
I tend to think that if Motorola does something in Germany, they will pay the consequences US.
So if Motorola were to do it anyway, German customs would still enforce the injunction, but Motorola management in the US would risk punishment.
Probably, contempt of court. A US court is ordering a US company not to pursue another US company in a court in another nation.
Now, whether or not the ruling of the court is appropriate is a matter for the court of appeals.
Thanks, that makes sense.
However it still seems that a German judge could find the US court to be in contempt of court.
This seems to set a dangerous president, but then we've already seen that the US legal system feels it is allowed to rule on anything anywhere in the world without regard to other nations rights to their own legal processes.
I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that common sense alone is enough to tell you that the ruling of a US judge cannot overrule the ruling of a German judge on an injunction in Germany. I would think that even if Motorola is found in contempt of court that said ruling would be overturned. In my considered but amatuer opinion everyone involved should be able to safely ignore this ruling.
Then again, when has common sense ever played a role in the US legal system?
What goes on in Germany stays in Germany and ditto for the US.
On a more serious note I would have thought that if the German and US arms of Moto and MS were separate legal entities registered in the local country most of the arguments from MS and the US judge become null and void.
Ie both MS and Moto's entities have to obey local laws first and head office directives second.
NOT a MS fanboy, far from it, but Microsoft is in the right here. Microsoft and Motorola have been in court in the US over patent and FRAND for almost a year before Motorola decided to try to get an injunction in Germany since Germany is very patent-holder friendly and not FRAND-friendly. Essentially, Motorola tried to short-circuit the US lawsuit before it could be fully adjudicated and it would seem they didn't like their chances of winning in the US.
It would be like arguing with your neighbor over the shrubs and your neighbor then going to another country to sue you over it. What's the point of that?
This has never been about right or wrong, or even necessarily legal. Microsoft are the past masters at pulling every dirty trick in the book to stiff other people with and damn the consequences because that's the game they play. If Google via Motorola are giving Microsoft a little arm-twisting treatment of their own, well they're just playing the game, aren't they? What was that about "Don't Hate The Player"?
Of course they're bogus.
If they weren't bogus Microsoft would be only too happy to say
"Here is a list of patents you are currently infringing, there could be more, we'll keep you posted as we find them"
Instead they say you are infringing n patents pay up or else.
The reason people are paying up is that so far M$ have been asking for less that the probably cost of fighting it through the courts.
It should be made illegal to accuse someone of patent infringement without providing full details of how you feel they are infringing which patents. The kind of vague you're infringing our patents, cough up or else approach is the kind of shake down which would be deemed demanding money with menaces in other walks of life.
Do you honestly believe that MS simply drop (for example) motorola an email saying 'you are infringing 23 patents, pay us $15 per android handset, or we sue'.
And Moto simply pay up without argument? Of course they don't. Of course MS have to say what and why, and even if they didn't, they would in court, whereupon the 'defendant' could chose to continue to fight or settle.
Just because they don't make it public?
Don't be so deliberately ignorant. I'm not saying all MS's claims are valid, only a test in court can decide that, but just because someone chooses not to fight don't take that as 'nasty MS'. Given the names so far that have settled, I'm pretty certain they could have afforded to fight if they wanted to.
Or, have they, just maybe, simply settled because it got them favours in return from MS? You know, like a business deal...
"Or, have they, just maybe, simply settled because it got them favours in return from MS? You know, like a business deal..."
Part of the problem here is of course that most companies involved in these kinds of deals insist on NDAs leaving us with little but rumour to go on. However, I must admit that this series of deals that MS has apparently been cutting with world + dog (including such companies as Samsung who can well afford to tell Redmond to go screw if they choose) do smell of some kind of cross-licensing set-up. It is perfectly possible that the real net cost to all involved may be somewhat different from the various rumours concerning cost-per-device that we have seen.
"Do you honestly believe that MS simply drop (for example) motorola an email saying 'you are infringing 23 patents, pay us $15 per android handset, or we sue'."
Do you honestly not remember the SCO vs IBM case? SCO accused IBM of copying large swaths of copyright Unix code into Linux - just so they (SCO) could blackmail users of linux into paying a license fee, but then it turned out they couldn't show any actual cases where copyright material had been copied into Linux and as it turned out, they didn't even own the Unix copyrights anyway.
I know Microsoft != SCO, but they're still not a stranger to spreading FUD, so just because they say something, doesn't make it true
No problem with that, let's ban Fandroid and Fanboi while we're at it.
And Fondleslab (of any description) and 'Mobe' which was heavily voted down,yet still appeared from the journos who post. Much less prevalent at the moment though.
This is El Reg - You don't like it, neither do I, but we're here.
It is certainly time to grow up. Sadly the trolls are unlikely to do so.
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