Motorola Wants 2.25% of Apple’s Sales in Exchange for Patent License

The legal battle going on between Apple and Motorola in Germany’s Mannheim court is starting to get pretty intense. Just yesterday, Apple was forced to pull some of its 3G products from its German online store as the result of a temporary injunction.

Although Apple quickly won a suspension on the ruling and the products are on sale again, the damage is done. The court has ruled that it believes that Apple is using one of Motorola’s wireless patents. And for that, Motorola wants to get paid…

FOSSPatents is reporting that Motorola has asked Apple for a staggering 2.25% of its profits in exchange for the use of its wireless patents. This is considered to be a FRAND (Fair Reasonable and Non Discriminatory) offer by Motorola, which is mandatory for companies who possess standard-essential patents.

But the offer is anything but fair and reasonable:

“Apple’s January 30, 2012 brief opposing MMI’s motion to quash contains some information that a lot of people are wondering about these days when they see what’s going on between Apple and Motorola over FRAND patents: the royalty rate that Motorola demanded when Apple asked for a FRAND offer.

The answer is 2.25%. I assume this relates to Apple’s sales and to all of MMU’s standard-essential patents, though the context is only one patent (the one over which Motorola has already forced Apple, temporarily, to remove certain products from its German online store). Assuming in Motorola’s favor that this was a license to all standard-essential wireless patents, the amount still appears excessive to me given how many companies hold patents on such standards and what royalty rate this would lead to in the aggregate.”

The site goes on to explain that Apple has a number of ways to fight the infringement ruling, but it still looks like there’s a good chance that it could end up paying Motorola quite a bit of money over these patents. Stay tuned, this one’s getting interesting.