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The patent hearings of the past few months have largely resulted in a stalemate between Apple and its antagonists, and Apple suffered several defeats around the turn of the year. But now the tide has changed, at least temporarily, with Apple filing claims against Motorola Mobility with the European Commission, perhaps flushed with new successes against the future Google handset arm, as well as HTC.

Motorola said Apple filed a complaint with the European Union's competition authority accusing the company of breaking a promise to license standards-essential patents on 'Frand' (fair reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms, as required by bodies like ETSI. The European Commission is increasingly concerned about the potential for owners of essential IPR to use that to distort competition, and has launched probes against Samsung as well as companies in other industries such as DuPont. "We are aware of the increasingly strategic use of patents in the sector and are vigilant," said EU competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia in a statement recently. "We can avoid a continuation of this patent war."

Motorola Mobility said it was willing to negotiate a patent licence with Apple. "MMI has a long standing practice of licensing our patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and we offered those to Apple," said spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson.

Motorola has been putting pressure on its rival, having won two out of three lawsuits it filed against Apple in Germany, one of them forcing the larger vendor to remove some iPhone models. Apple has upped the ante following similar defeats at Samsung's hands, pressurizing the EC to investigate Frand practices at its rivals. Apple is relatively immune from such charges as few of its patents are fundamental to wireless standards, giving it greater freedom to licence its IPR on its own terms and to seek injunctions against alleged violators. Google recently reassured regulators that, when it owns Motorola Mobility, it will adhere to Frand guidelines for its standards- essential patents and will not seek product bans in those instances.

Apple did gain a recent victory in German courts, when a Munich judge ruled in its favor in two verdicts against Motorola Mobility. These found that two Motorola mechanisms used to lock screens infringed the German part of Apple's European EP 1 964 022 B 1 patent, which relates to the 'slide to unlock' process common on touchscreen phones. The products involved are Motorola's Flipout, Milestone, Milestone XT720, Milestone 2 and Defy Android handsets.

The ruling enables Apple to seek an injunction against the named products if it chooses, and to demand damages of an undetermined amount against a bond of €25m per ruling. However, the court also said the verdict could be appealed, and it rejected a third infringement claim, against the unlocking device used by Motorola's Xoom tablet, which works somewhat differently.

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