The country’s top civil court found that the method for unlocking smartphones was neither sophisticated nor innovative enough for patenting.
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The ruling thus upheld the decision made by the lower German court in 2013 which cancelled the Apple German patent as the technique was quite similar to a phone by Swedish company called Neonode Inc which was released a year before the iPhone’s 2007 launch.
Apple could not be reached for a reaction to the effect of this court ruling on their sales.
The phone didn’t have a touchscreen like the iPhone, but it used a gesture module as a dialer, one that also had a “Slide to Unlock” function.
While Apple was initially successful, the appeals court later voiced their skepticism that Apple had suffered irreparable harm from the patent’s alleged misuse. Post bankruptcy, it built itself into an intellectually property firm licensing its patented optical technology for use in phones, tablets, readers and other touch screen devices. This feature has since been used by many smartphone OEMs and operating systems.
Apple won that case but the ruling was later overturned by the federal patent court.
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Motorola Mobility, at the time a unit of Google Inc but now owned by China’s Lenovo Group Ltd, filed the original suit in a Munich court against the Apple user interface patent. This case is still pending on appeal, but with today’s ruling, it should now progress forward in favor of Motorola.
