The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California has granted Qualcomm Inc.’s request for a temporary restraining order against Motorola Inc.
Qualcomm said the order prohibits Motorola from stating, suggesting, inferring or otherwise communicating directly or indirectly to Qualcomm’s customers, suppliers and prospective suppliers or to others proposing to do business with Qualcomm, that the company in any way unlawfully relied on Motorola’s intellectual property in designing and producing the Q phone.
Motorola filed a patent infringement lawsuit last month in Illinois federal court against Qualcomm claiming the company’s new Code Division Multiple Access Q phone copies the basic look and functions of Motorola’s StarTac wearable cellular phone. Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against Motorola in California federal court seeking a declaratory judgment ruling that Qualcomm’s products do not infringe any Motorola patents.
In handing down the temporary restraining order, the court found that Qualcomm had demonstrated a sufficient likelihood of success on its claims for false advertising and unfair competition to warrant issuance of a temporary restraining order, said Qualcomm. The court further indicated that Motorola had made at least one false statement in its representations of Qualcomm’s alleged utility patent infringement. Motorola informed Qualcomm’s customers that the Q phone infringed upon Motorola’s patents even though Motorola had no basis for making such a claim since it had no knowledge of the relevant features of the Q phone, the court stated in a written order.
Qualcomm also announced that the federal court in Illinois has granted its motion to transfer the lawsuit filed by Motorola to California federal court, where the earlier complaint filed by Qualcomm against Motorola is pending.
“We are currently ramping production of the Q phone at our San Diego factory to satisfy the demand of PCS (personal communications services) carriers and their customers,” said Paul Jacobs, president of Qualcomm’s Subscriber Products Division. “We look forward to resolving this legal dispute as we continue to design and manufacture innovative new products for the growing CDMA marketplace.”
