Apple won another patent victory against Motorola today regarding Cupertino's "slide-to-unlock" technology.
Judge Dr. Peter Guntz of the Munich I Regional Court found that some of Motorola Mobility's products infringe on Apple's slide-to-unlock image patent, according to patent blogger Florian Mueller, who attended this morning's hearing.
The court evaluated three implementations of slide-to-unlock on Motorola devices. Apple won on the first two, which relate to Motorola smartphones, but lost on the third, which is used in the Motorola Xoom tablet.
"That implementation is very similar to what I have on my Samsung Galaxy Note: the user has to make a swiping gesture from the inside of a circle to the outside," Mueller wrote in a blog post. "It requires a relatively large screen to work somewhat well, but even then it's not very intuitive."
What happens next is up to Apple. With today's ruling, Apple has the right to enforce the injunction and pull the offending Motorola products from store shelves in Germany. But if Motorola wins on appeal, Apple will have to reimburse the company all the money it lost while its products were banned. As a result, Apple will have to decide if it's worth the gamble.
"It's a safe assumption that Motorola will appeal this decision," Mueller wrote. But "this is largely a win for Apple that will result in a noticeable degradation of the user experience of Motorola's products."
The ruling comes the same week that EU and U.S. officials approved Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Mueller speculated that today's decision could have the biggest impact on Google and Android.
"Apple is asserting the same patent as well as a related utility model against Samsung in Mannheim, and can always bring claims against more Android device makers in this jurisdiction," he wrote. "Today's ruling is significant bad news for Android at large, and Google."
Last week, meanwhile, the same Munich court threw out one of Motorola's patent claims against Apple regarding 3G/UMTS wireless technology. But that came after two wins for Motorola. In December, a Manheim judge found that certain Apple products infringe on Motorola patents for data packet transfer technology (GPRS). That prompted the temporary removal of several Apple products from its German online story earlier this month.
Also this month, meanwhile, the Manheim court granted a permanent injunction against Apple's iCloud push email notifications.