EU Considering Apple, Microsoft Patent War Against Motorola

The European Commission opened on Tuesday two antitrust investigations against Google's Motorola Mobility following complaints from Apple and Microsoft in a patent war between the technology giants, the Agence France Presse said Tuesday.

The EU competition watchdog said it would check whether Motorola had abused a dominant market position on patents by seeking court injunctions against Apple and Microsoft from selling their iPhone, iPad, Xbox and Windows products.

Microsoft and Apple accuse Motorola Mobility of unfairly using its patent portfolio to try to block competing products.

In February, European Union and US regulators cleared the acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion (9.4 billion euros) by Google.

Standard essential patents are at issue. SEPs are patents which have been identified by technology companies as necessary to allow them to build compatible products.

Motorola Mobility is failing to live up to an industry pledge to license SEPs to rivals on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms, according to Microsoft and Apple.

Motorola made FRAND commitments to standard setting organizations for 2G and 3G mobile and wireless telecommunications, H.264 video compression and WLAN technologies.

The commission said it would assess whether Motorola Mobility "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."