Hot on the heels of US customs imposing an International Trade Commission ban on select HTC devices we have yet another exclusion order from the ITC, but this time around it’s Microsoft winning their patent claim against Motorola. The patent in question dates back to 1998 and relates to scheduling a meeting with a group using a mobile device and having that event sync across mobile devices and PCs. As with many of these claims this sounds like fairly ridiculous feature to be able to patent, but the key is always in the exact implementation of the feature so it’s possible that Motorola will be able to come up with another way of handling the function (that is the tactic HTC employed in their case). As you may recall from the HTC ruling this exclusion order doesn’t have any immediate ramifications for consumers as first the order goes to President Obama, who has 60 days to overturn the ruling should he so desire. My understanding is that the likelihood of this is just slightly higher than the next iPhone running Jelly Bean

Continue reading →