In October 2010, Microsoft sued Motorola for patent infringement of their smartphone-related patents in both the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and W.D. Washington district court. Case 696 F.3d 872 (9th Cir. 2012) was a United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit case about Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) Licensing and foreign anti-suit injunction. RAND, in the patent sense not the African currency, denotes "a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard." Apparently 9 aspects of Motorola's Android smartphones infringed on Microsoft's patents, these include the following:
5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames
6,370,566: Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device
6,621,746: Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations
7,644,376: Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes
6,826,762: Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer
6,909,910: Method and system for managing changes to a contact database
5,664,133: Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior
6,578,054: Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information
5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filename
In short, these patents include such aspects as Calendar, Update Software, Contacts, and many more. Soon after this file was made, Motorola sent Microsoft two letters. The letters outlined an offer in which Motorola asked Microsoft for a 2.25% royalty rate on the price of all end products (the smartphone android in question) that Microsoft sold which drew upon the technologies that Motorola had patented. Microsoft deemed this idea completely outlandish and insane so they responded by filing a "breach of contract case" against Motorola, claiming that Motorola had violated its agreement "to provide reasonable and non-discriminatory terms of licensing to all potential licensees on a global scale." So, officially on November 9th, Microsoft files an official complaint against Motorola, stating that they had gone against their contractual RAND licensing obligations. In court, Judge Robart dismissed most of Microsoft’s claims, but upheld the breach of contract claims.
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