In case you don’t recall or happened to miss the story, the United States International Trade Commission ordered an import ban on many different Motorola devices running Android due to infringing a Microsoft patent. What was the patent? Rather simple, the patent covered the ability to create meeting requests from a mobile device.
Either way, starting tomorrow, Wednesday, July 18th, the ban will go in effect for 18 smartphones and tablets from Motorola. This is quite the big deal and if the company doesn’t act quick, they’ll suffer in terms of lost sales, angry loyal customers, and some not so great press. They’re not just sitting around and twiddling their thumbs however. Motorola Mobility, now owned by Google, said they have some plans to keep the ban from happening and their devices in stores and available online.
What those plans entail we don’t really know yet, but we’ll find out here very soon. At this point, there are basically two options that the company has. Either pay Microsoft a licensing fee on each device sold or completely remove the feature from all of their devices. The patent system is a nasty one and hopefully the situation can be resolved even if Motorola submits and simply decides to pay Microsoft.
Not ideal, but to completely remove a feature from 18 different devices isn’t an easy task.