Apple, Google Agree to Halt Smartphone Patent Wars

IT heavyweights Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) agreed last week to put to rest their Motorola Mobility legal hostilities, ending what was an attention-grabbing lawsuit initiated four years ago with a deal to dismiss all their patent violation cases against one another.

Neither company provided any details of their agreement other than to say the settlement does not include any cross-licensing of their technologies.

Apple and Google asked a federal appeals court in Washington to dismiss their cases against each other, according to reports.

“Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform,” the companies said in a statement.

The hostilities date to 2010 when Apple and Motorola each claimed the other had infringed upon their respective patents. When Google bought Motorola in August 2011 for some $12.5 billion, it inherited the legal issues. This past January, Chinese PC giant Lenovo took Motorola off Google’s hands for $2.91 billion, but the legal conflict remained with Google.

In the 2010 lawsuit, Motorola claimed Apple had infringed its patents on cellular phones operating on 3G networks, while the iPhone maker claimed some of its intellectual property on smartphone features had been violated. The case was dismissed in 2012 over a lack of evidence on both companies’ part but just last month an appeals court gave Apple another chance to litigate its claims.

In Apple’s recently concluded patent infringement trial against Korean device maker Samsung, some jury members said afterward that if Apple believes certain baked-in features of Google’s Android OS violate its patents, it should challenge the search colossus directly. Even though Apple has stacked up $1.05 billion in damage awards from Samsung in two patent violation trials, questions remained over whether it would go after Google.

Now with this settlement that seems unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future.