Germany’s Mannheim Regional Court has judged in Motorola’s favor in a recent patent dispute, reports FOSS Patents, preliminarily banning sales of Apple’s iOS devices across Europe.
The court has determined that Apple is in violation of a Motorola patent relating to GPRS data transfers. The sales injunction against Apple specifically includes most of Apple’s iOS-based devices:
The ruling generally relates to all Apple products that implement the patent-in-suit. The ruling notes that, ‘inter alia,’ this includes the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G. But the iPhone 4S, which was released after this litigation started (April 2011), undoubtedly implements the same telecommunications standard.
The ruling is only preliminary, and is only enforceable against Apple’s Ireland subsidiary “Apple Sales International,” so Apple could easily use another branch of their company to sidestep the ruling.
Apple must now either remove the infringing functionality from their devices (which is considered essential for GPRS “EDGE” data to function), or file an appeal with the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court to have the ban removed.
