According to Bloomberg, Motorola Mobility has just filed a new lawsuit against Apple at the ITC. Now, ordinarily, we might not report on the filing of such a suit - especially when the complaint hasn't been made public (we have basically zero details). What makes this particular filing important, though, is that it is the first lawsuit filed by Motorola now that it is officially, 100% a part of Google. That's a big deal.
It means Google signed off on this action. It means Google isn't interested in playing a purely defensive role in the mobile patent wars. And while this is sort of by proxy (MMI is in many senses separate from Google), the fact that Motorola filed this suit at all says a lot. Motorola had this to say about the action: "Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations.”
The lawsuit seeks to have "the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and various Apple computers" banned from import into the United States. When the full complaint becomes available, we'll update you on just what it is Motorola is asserting here (and more importantly, if they're using any Google patents). The takeaway, though, is that Google isn't ready to let this fight turn into glorified feature-stripping of Android. Which, frankly, is what it has become for companies like Samsung and HTC.
The problem has been that most previous claims by Android manufacturers against Apple have lacked much in the way of legal teeth (or been based on standards-essential patents), so I'm very curious to see what Google-approved allegations Motorola is slinging against Apple here. We'll find out soon enough.