Motorola files paperwork to invalidate 11 Apple phone patents

Is Motorola expecting an Apple ounter-suit over patents? Since Motorola recently sued Apple over patent infringement, the company might well be, and thus Motorola has proactively moved, trying to invalidate 11 Apple patents.

These patents are, according to Patently Apple, the same patents Apple earlier sued HTC over. PA also said that Motorola had even been trying to come to a cross-licensing agreement with Apple, but the deal fell through, and now it's time to go on the offensive.

The following are the patents that Motorola seeks to have invalidated by a federal judge in Delaware.

• U.S. Patent No. 5,455,599: "Object-oriented graphic system"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,519,867: "Object-oriented multitasking system"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,566,337: "Method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,915,131: "Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,929,852: "Encapsulated network entity reference of a network component system"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647: "System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data"
• U.S. Patent No. 5,969,705: "Message protocol for controlling a user interface from an inactive application program"
• U.S. Patent No. 6,275,983: "Object-oriented operating system"
• U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263: "Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data"
• U.S. Patent No. 6,424,354: "Object-oriented event notification system with listener registration of both interests and methods"
• U.S. Patent No. RE39,486: "Extensible, replaceable network component system"

So many mobile companies are suing each other, it's difficult to keep track of them all.  Recently, Microsoft sued Motorola for patent infringement; HTC licensed those patents earlier in the year to both shore up its own patent library against Apple's suit and to prevent a suit from Microsoft.