Motorola took a pretty heavy hit yesterday when a judge in Seattle, WA ruled that 13 patent violation claims made by Motorola were invalidated on the grounds that the claims were too vague and too weak. The patents in question this time around involved several H.264 video encoding patents and were claimed in an attempt by Google and Motorola to seek $4 billion dollars in damages from Microsoft. Microsoft disputed these claims by counter-claiming that Google and Motorola refused to present an answer under FRAND licensing.
Many believe that Google purchased Motorola in order to gain an advantage in patents and with this recent defeat in court, Google might be rethinking it's purchase. Initially Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion dollars which gave the impression that Google saw something important in Motorola, and with good reason. Motorola has always been a popular manufacturer of smartphones in the past and it seemed to be to Google's advantage to purchase them. Rumors have been floating around about an “X Phone” from Motorola to debut at Google I/O 2013 and with patent disputes continuing to disappoint Google, it might be time for them to put more energy into producing the new phone.
Source: Phandroid