A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled that
Microsoft’s Xbox videogame consoles should face a U.S. import and sales
ban for violating four patents owned by Motorola Mobility, which was
just purchased Tuesday by Google.
ITC Administrative Law Judge David Shaw decided in April
that the Xbox has violated four Motorola patents that pertain to the
H.264 video compression codec and wireless technologies used in both
gaming controllers and consoles. Last month, in deciding that the Xbox
was violating Motorola’s patents, Shaw made no recommendation to halt
Xbox sales or imports. In the court document, released to the public on Monday, that changed and Shaw recommended the bans.
The ruling adds to the growing and increasingly petty patent fights
between the world’s largest electronics makers and online software
companies, which is leading to billion-dollar stockpiles of patents, a drawn-out lawsuit between Oracle and Google that threatens to ruin APIs, and HTC’s flagship smartphone being quarantined over how it handles a user clicking on phone numbers in an e-mail.
