Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
Motorola, Inc. — founded September 25, 1928 in Chicago by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, renamed Motorola, Inc. in 1947 — was an American multinational telecommunications and electronics company headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was publicly traded (NYSE: MOT) and reported roughly 53,000 employees in 2010. The entity no longer exists: on January 4, 2011 Motorola, Inc. legally became Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) and spun off its consumer businesses as Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI), which Google acquired in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014.
Its product lines spanned: mobile handsets (DynaTAC, MicroTAC, StarTAC, RAZR, Android-based Droid); public-safety and two-way radio systems (ASTRO, DIMETRA); enterprise mobility hardware including barcode scanners, RFID and mobile computing; cellular network infrastructure such as base stations; and cable/broadband equipment including set-top boxes and modems. Its semiconductor operations were divested earlier (ON Semiconductor, Freescale).
Litigation posture: In the tracked data Motorola, Inc. appears once, as plaintiff, with no defendant appearances — the profile of an operating company enforcing its own IP, not a non-practicing entity. It is not a prolific filer and shows no NPE-style assertion pattern; the company is not associated with plaintiff-friendly venues like the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case: Motorola, Inc. v. Lemko Corporation et al., No. 08 C 5427 (N.D. Ill., filed 2008), a trade-secret and patent-ownership dispute against wireless-equipment rival Lemko Corp. and fourteen individuals, many former Motorola engineers (including Lemko CEO Nicholas Labun and CTO Shaowei Pan). Motorola sought a declaratory judgment that it owned eight Lemko patents and ten pending applications, plus claims for trade-secret misappropriation under the Illinois Trade Secrets Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations and breach of contract; Huawei Technologies was added in 2010 and dismissed by settlement in 2011. The court denied summary judgment in January 2012, and the parties settled all pending federal and state claims later that month under successor Motorola Solutions.
Apple filed a Section 337 complaint against Motorola asserting US 7,812,828, US 7,663,607, and US 5,379,430. The ALJ found literal infringement of the asserted '607 claims but held them invalid; the Commission affirmed invalidity under §103 and terminated the investigation with no violation.
Apple asserted U.S. Patent 5,379,430 (claims 1, 3, and 5) against Motorola Android smartphones as Count III of its complaint. On November 5, 2012, the morning trial was to begin, Judge Barbara B. Crabb dismissed the case with prejudice; the narrative states there was no merits ruling on the '430 patent.