Apple has filed two patent lawsuits against Motorola, claiming that the recovering handset vendor had infringed its intellectual property, primarily relating to user interface technology including multi-touch input for smartphones. A number of Motorola products were specifically named in the suit, including several Droid devices offered by Verizon Wireless and a number of WCDMA devices supported by AT&T and T-Mobile USA. The suit follows an action launched in October 2010 by Motorola, which claims that a number of Apple products infringe Motorola patents, across a number of areas including radio interfaces, wireless email, proximity sensing, software application management, location-based services and multi-device synchronisation.

Separately, Oracle has made a new filing in its previously announced patent infringement suit with Google, which covers the use of Java technology in the Android platform. The company has now provided specific examples of Android code that it states infringes its Java patents, also arguing that “approximately one third” of the application programming interfaces (APIs) used in Android are “derivative” of Oracle’s copyrighted Java APIs. Google has previously responded to Oracle’s claims by stating that its filing “fails to meet the pleading standards applicable to a claim of copyright infringement,” while also accusing Oracle of hypocrisy in its attitudes toward the open-source community.