Apple had asked the commission to block imports of Motorola phones such as the Droid and Droid X that run Google Inc.’s Android software, claiming they infringed on its patents.

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In a filing yesterday (see below), Judge William Alsup proposed a trial plan to lawyers for both sides, stating that the trial “will not be in 2011.” Alsup said he expects a long trial that will likely be considered a hardship by people selected to sit on the jury. “Although the trial will not be in 2011, the Court needs some lead time to pre-clear a venire for hardship for a long trial,” Alsup wrote in the filing. The word “venire” refers to the jury selection process. Alsup didn’t hint when he expects the trial to begin.

Court-mandated face-to-face talks between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page failed last month. The trial had been expected sometime this month.

Oracle has claimed that Google owes it more than $6 billion for parts of its Java software that were used in the Android mobile operating system, which Oracle took over after it acquired Sun Microsystems last year. Google has argued that Oracle’s claims for damages are flawed.

Goog Orcl Delay

Today, Samsung came out and said pretty much the same thing about Apple. In an interview with the Associated Press, Lee Younghee, Samsung’s head of global marketing for mobile communications, said the company will come harder after Apple for its own alleged infringements, business relationship between the two companies be damned.

“We’ve been quite respectful and also passive in a way,” Younghee said. “However, we shouldn’t be … anymore. We’ll be pursuing our rights for this in a more aggressive way from now on. … We believe Apple is free riding [on our innovations].”

According to reports, the companies’ CEOs, Larrys Ellison and Page, are still at an impasse over how to settle Oracle’s patent-infringement lawsuit against Google over the use of Java in its Android operating system.

The latest sticking point: A recommendation from Oracle’s damages expert arguing the company is owed more than $2 billion for copyright infringement and $201.8 million more for patent infringement.

That’s significantly less than the $6.1 billion Oracle claimed Google owes it in court papers, but it’s still far too heady a figure for the search giant.

Reuters reports that in a Tuesday letter to the judge presiding over the case, Google attorney Robert Van Nest urged the court to reject that recommendation, slagging it as deficient. According to Van Nest, its failure to explain just how the figure was calculated and the forecast for how much revenue Oracle might have earned by partnering with Google on Android are grounds enough for ignoring it.

Meanwhile, talks between the dueling Larrys drag on, with an October trial date looming if they fail to reach a settlement.

In a brief opposing Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States, Samsung argues that one of the iPad design patents at issue in the case is predated by a prop used in Kubrick’s 1968 film.

“Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded online. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.”

In other words, if Samsung “slavishly” copied Apple, Apple equally slavishly copied a design featured in Kubrick’s seminal science fiction film.

Will the court agree? It seems unlikely, but who knows. There certainly are similarities, and Samsung clearly feels they’re worth noting. But are they substantial enough to undermine Apple’s legal offensive? In any event, this has got to be one of the greatest prior-art defenses ever mounted.

“If Apple views HTC as one of its major competitors in US market for high end smartphones and leverages these legal tactics to seek royalty payments, this could raise HTC’s cost structure relative to Apple and other Android makers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Jasmine Lu said in a note to clients. “[And that] could adversely affect HTC’s share opportunity if other Android makers are not required to pay the same royalties as HTC in the near future.”

HTC plans to appeal the ruling. But as many an observer has pointed out, preliminary ITC determinations are seldom overturned.

“The space is just out of control,” Dashwire CEO Ford Davidson said in a phone interview with Mobilized. “You can’t even keep track of who is suing whom.”

Google, for example, said this week that it is bidding $900 million to acquire a pool of patents from bankrupt Nortel, citing the increased mobile litigation over Android as a motivator.

While much of the attention is on moves by big players such as Nokia, Microsoft and Apple, patent disputes among less well-known firms are also becoming more common. Dashwire, for example, is facing a suit, filed in January, from rival Synchronoss.

In the wake of that suit and with all of the other patent litigation in the industry, Davidson said Dashwire started conversations with Intellectual Ventures that ultimately led to the licensing pact. RIM also recently signed a licensing deal with Intellectual Ventures, a patent firm started by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.

“All of these things were coming together,” Davidson said.

Davidson said, as a small company with about 25 employees, he’d like to be focused on building products, not dealing with litigation.

“In starting a tech company these days, one of the realities is that at some point you are going to get hit with an infringement suit,” Davidson said.

For its part, Intellectual Ventures said it has seen an increase in mobile-related patent activity, particularly now that the smartphone has taken center stage.

“You’ve seen a lot of patent assertion and patent licensing and also litigation from all size companies,” Intellectual Ventures Vice President Joe Chernesky said in a phone interview. “There’s been such a massive integration of technology in mobile phones.”

Whole sectors that used to be separate, like the PDA, are now just one feature of a smartphone. “All of that technology has been merged into one product,” Chernesky said.

What’s more, the industry is filled with start-ups, many of whom haven’t built up much of a patent portfolio to fend off litigation, particularly since patents can take years to acquire.

“We’ve actually gained a lot of customers who develop and sell products in the mobile space,” Chernesky said. “They are all facing significant intellectual property threats and patent threats.”

Among the start-ups it has signed deals with is Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass., provider of voice-to-text software for smartphones.

Although mobile has always been an area of interest for Intellectual Ventures in terms of both invention and patent acquisition, Chernesky said the company will probably be investing even more now that its customer base is growing.

“We tend to focus acquisitions and investment based on actual customers,” he said.

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law,” Mr. Davis wrote in a court filing. “No matter how attractive a party paints the facade of its case, it is worthless without the requisite foundational support.”

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment Tuesday, while lawyers representing Mirror Worlds didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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However, Microsoft’s statement showed its target is the broader Android operating system.

“The Android platform infringes a number of Microsoft’s patents, and companies manufacturing and shipping Android devices must respect our intellectual property rights,” Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement, “To facilitate that we have established an industry-wide patent licensing program for Android device manufacturers.”

Gutierrez said that others, such as HTC, have agreed to license Microsoft patents for use with Android-based products and added that Microsoft “tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec.”

A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined comment, citing a policy against speaking about litigation matters.

Microsoft has also taken to the courts over Android as well, filing patent suits against Motorola for that company’s use of the Google-developed open source operating system.

Redmond has said that, while it hopes Windows Phone will eventually rival Android in the market, it is seeking revenue for its mobile patents from those making Android-based devices.

“Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market,” Gutierrez added.

This marks the first time the Rochester, N.Y.-based company has received what is known as a negative initial determination recommendation from the trade body. An administrative law judge at the ITC found Kodak’s patents invalid and not infringed by Apple’s iPhone or RIM’s BlackBerry devices. The final decision is expected May 23.

Kodak reports fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday.

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Among the phones that Sony alleges are infringing on its technology are the Accolate, Encore, enV Touch, Glance, Lotus Elite, Neon, Quantum and Rumor Touch.

The latest legal challenge adds to an already crowded docket of wireless competitors making patent-related claims. Just a partial list of the court battles has Nokia against Apple, Motorola against Microsoft, Apple against HTC and Oracle against Google.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith predicted last month that the various players will probably agree on some sort of appropriate royalty streams covering modern smartphones. in the meantime, it looks like the lawyers for all the cellphone makers will remain gainfully employed in 2011.

Allen sued Google, Apple, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples and Yahoo in August, but the case was dismissed earlier this month, with Tuesday set as the deadline for Interval to file an amended complaint. As noted by open source industry blogger Florian Mueller, the new claims include allegations that Android infringes on Interval patents, adding to a growing list of legal claims being leveled in the mobile arena.

The move follows Apple’s suits against Nokia as well as Nokia’s earlier suits against Apple in U.S. court, and is part of a growing docket of cases that will have almost every cellphone maker as either plaintiff, defendant or both.

The latest actions were filed in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands, and allege that the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, among other products, infringe on Nokia’s technology.

“These actions add 13 further Nokia patents to the 24 already asserted against Apple in the US International Trade Commission and the Delaware and Wisconsin Federal courts,” Nokia VP of intellectual property Paul Melin said in a statement. “The Nokia inventions protected by these patents include several which enable compelling user experiences. For example, using a wiping gesture on a touch screen to navigate content, or enabling access to constantly changing services with an on-device app store, both filed more than ten years before the launch of the iPhone.”

The Nokia filings relate to a number of different areas, from antenna structures to app stores to noise suppression and displays.

An Apple spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

At the moment, there is a lot of litigation around cellphone technology. To list just a few of the big cases, Apple is suing HTC, Oracle is suing Google, and Microsoft and Motorola are suing each other.

At a dinner last month, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith predicted that eventually there will be some sort of understanding of who is owed what in royalties for a modern smartphone. For now, though, it’s just a good time to be an intellectual property lawyer.

The comments by Motorola (MOT) co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha were his company’s first detailed remarks on the lawsuits filed by Microsoft at the International Trade Commission and federal court in Seattle.

The suits were viewed as an attempt to slow the explosive growth of Google Inc.’s (GOOG) competing mobile operating system, Android, which Motorola uses exclusively on its smartphones.

In an interview Tuesday at a technology conference in San Francisco, Mr. Jha said he is willing to look at using Microsoft’s operating system if the software company gets it right.

“I am open to finding ways to work with Microsoft,” Mr. Jha said. “But it has to be a compelling offering.”

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“There are no guiltless parties with white hats in this little drama. This skirmish isn’t much about patents or principles or programming languages. The suit is far more about ego, money and power.”

– Java creator James Gosling on Oracle’s patent infringement lawsuit against Google

“Patent trolls are part of the industry today; that’s just the way it is,” he said. “We’ve dealt with them before and we’ll deal with this situation in the same exact way. I’m just very disappointed in this, from a former leader of our industry, that they would do this.”

Benioff’s remarks today echo those he made during a May 20 earnings call, though this time he exercised a bit of restraint and stopped short of decrying Microsoft (MSFT) as a bunch of “alley thugs.”

His message, I suppose, is that Salesforce.com (CRM) isn’t much worried by Microsoft’s suit–though perhaps it should be, given the limited patent portfolio in its defense arsenal and Microsoft’s endgame here. As analyst Rob Enderle wrote last week:

Microsoft wants to set an example and losing isn’t an option. In addition the patents in question are key to being able to defend Microsoft’s existing market making the combination into one of the most important legal efforts that Microsoft is likely to undertake. This means they probably won’t settle, will fund the effort fully, and will do whatever it takes to make it successful. ?

“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America, HTC Corporation, in a statement announcing the litigation. “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”

The intellectual property to which Mackenzie refers here isn’t clear, since the company has not disclosed the patents it believes Apple (AAPL) violated. Which is a little odd, considering the breadth and heft of Apple’s 20 patent claim against HTC.

That HTC hasn’t announced the patents it believes Apple to have infringed seems…unusual. Unless, of course, there’s not much to them, in which case it might make sense to make a big splash with a press release that prevents observers from assessing the viability of the claims it’s making against Apple. Also unusual, the fact that HTC hasn’t yet filed a lawsuit in federal court, which might suggest a lack of confidence in its case.

HTC declined to provide me with a copy of the suit or a list of the patents involved.

Reached for comment, Apple declined to offer one, referring me to its original complaint against HTC, which can be found here.

UPDATE: Here’s a copy of HTC’s suit.

Further Reading:

• Apple Sues Nexus One Maker HTC Over iPhone Patents
• Apple Sues HTC [Complete Court Filings]
• Apple vs. Google: Game On
• HTC May End Up Bringing Knife to Apple Gun Fight
• HTC to Apple: We Built a Touchscreen Phone Before You Did

Filed in Federal District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin, the suit alleges that Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPad 3G infringe on five Nokia (NOK) patents related to enhanced speech and data transmission, the use of positioning data in applications, and innovations in antenna configurations.

“Nokia has been the leading developer of many key technologies in mobile devices,” said Paul Melin, general manager, Patent Licensing at Nokia. “We have taken this step to protect the results of our pioneering development and to put an end to continued unlawful use of Nokia’s innovation.”

Nokia first sued Apple in October 2009, claiming the iPhone violated 10 of its patents covering various wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption technologies.

Then, in December, Nokia filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission alleging that Apple infringes its patents “in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players and computers.”

Shortly thereafter, the company sued Apple in U.S. District Court in Delaware, making similar allegations.

Apple declined comment, but counterclaims Apple filed against Nokia last December offer a bit of insight into what its thinking on the matter might be.

In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. The iPhone is a converged device that allows users to access and ever expanding set of software features to take and send pictures, play music, play games do research, serve as a GPS device and much more….The iPhone platform has caused a revolutionary change in the mobile phone category.

In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces. As a result, Nokia has rapidly lost share in the market for high-end mobile phones. Nokia has admitted that, as a result of the iPhone launch, “the market changed suddenly and [Nokia was] not fast enough changing with it.

In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface….

As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, stated at Nokia’s GoPlay event in 2007 when asked about the similarities of Nokia’s new offerings to the already released iPhone: “[i]f there is something good in the world, we copy with pride.” True to this quote, Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple’s iPhone ideas as well as Apple’s basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia’s purported standards essential patent. Apple seeks redress for this behavior.

Five dollars and a dusty old Nokia 1100 says this thing settles out of court.

“The Apple lawsuit is a part of the Company’s strategy for pursuing its patent infringement claims relating to its Predictive Snooping technology. Consequently, the outcome of the Apple case, and any subsequent appeal, will play a role in the Company’s strategy for pursuing its patent infringement claims and the Company’s ability to realize licensing revenue from its Predictive Snoop patents. There can be no assurance of the extent to which the outcome of these rulings will lead to positive results in the Apple case or the Company’s overall licensing strategy.”

– OPTi statement on Apple litigation, April 23, 2009

If OPTi’s intellectual property lawsuit against Apple is truly the foundation of the company’s licensing strategy, then OPTi best prepare for its strategy to be shaken. Apple is appealing a recent court decision that found it guilty of infringing OPTi’s patents, and the $21.7 million in damages and prejudgment interest that accompanied it.

Apple (AAPL) has argued throughout the case that the OPTi patent at issue–U.S. Patent 6,405,291, “Predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses–should be declared invalid, if not because of prior art, then because it fails the obviousness test. Presumably, this is the tack Apple will take in the appeal as well, perhaps with greater success. If not, well, $21.7 million is a near-pittance for a company with some $30 billion in the bank.

Dow Jones Newswires reports that the two companies were in court today for a hearing on the issue. The wire service story notes that there was no decision today; ergo, DISH can (at least for now) continue to distribute the DVRs that are at the heart of the patent suit. TiVo has been asserting that the workaround for the patents in question that DISH has developed does not cure the patent infringement.

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