EU Opens Patent Abuse Investigation Into Motorola

PCMag: Prompted by complaints from Microsoft and Apple, the European Commission has launched a formal investigation into Motorola’s patent licensing practices. “The Commission will assess whether Motorola has abusively, and in contravention of commitments it gave to standard setting organizations, used certain of its standard essential patents to distort competition in the Internal Market in breach of EU antitrust rules,” the group said in a statement.

The debate centers around whether Motorola offered FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing terms for patents which are considered “essential.” Recently, the company has sued to ban sales of several Microsoft and Apple products in European countries because those companies had not paid licensing fees. However, Microsoft and Apple said that the terms Motorola offered were unreasonable.