The corporate leaders of both Apple and Samsung have agreed to meet one another next month to discuss settling their on-going patent dispute according to Reuters. They are scheduled to enter the courtroom in March in a new trial concerning a second set of patents unrelated to last year’s contentious trial. The meeting will be a good faith attempt by both leaders to settle longstanding differences amicably ahead of the trial. The two companies have faced one another countless times over a myriad of patents during the course of the last few years.
So far, Apple has won about $930 million in damages from Samsung. The trial scheduled for March is a new case unrelated to the 2013 trial, and will likely take months to resolve if the companies can’t agree to terms with the February meeting, which is being seen as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the March court date.
In related news, Apple was officially cleared in a patent case previously brought on by Google’s Motorola unit before Motorola became a part of the search giant in 2011. Apple was previously accused of using six selected Motorola patents in the iPhone and the U.S. International Trade Commission found that Apple didn’t violate one of the the patents in question in April of 2013.
Motorola had previously claimed Apple infringed six patents. The sole patent on appeal involved a way to control the delivery of data to applications on a wireless device and the Commission found that Apple used a completely different technique that wasn’t related to Motorola’s patent, therefore finding in favor of Apple. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld that decision today after months of appeals by Motorola, which means that one of the key reasons for Google buying Motorola has been rendered completely moot.
Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.4 billion in 2012 and subsequently gained access to the mobile arm’s extensive patent portfolio totaling 17,000 patents related to mobile telephony, but so far the portfolio has been ineffective in actually providing any actual utility for either Google or Motorola, even when taking into account Android and other OEMs, as legal battles with Microsoft and Apple over Android have proven costly for Google and Motorola. Motorola has also asserted that Microsoft has violated the same patent that Apple was cleared of violating earlier today.
