In a press release dated March 14, 2017, Motorola Solutions says:
Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) (“Motorola Solutions” or the “Company”) today announced it has filed complaints in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Hytera Communications Corporation Limited (SHE: 002583) (“Hytera”) of Shenzhen, China. The complaints assert that Hytera’s two-way radios, base stations, repeaters and dispatch systems, as well as its related commercialization and sales activities, are infringing patents owned by Motorola Solutions and utilizing stolen Motorola Solutions trade secrets.
Motorola Solutions believes that Hytera is intentionally infringing its intellectual property and misappropriating its trade secrets, which has enabled Hytera to compete unfairly by bypassing investment in innovation.
…
Hytera’s illegal behavior was assisted by three engineers who resigned from the Company to join Hytera, where they had key roles in developing Hytera’s infringing products using misappropriated Motorola Solutions technologies and continue in senior-level positions today. In the period leading up to their resignations, through a series of serious misrepresentations and carefully planned illegal acts, these engineers maliciously accessed, downloaded and transferred more than 7,000 highly confidential files related to Motorola Solutions’ technologies, including confidential technical, marketing, sales, legal and other types of trade secret materials. Subsequently, Hytera began illegally manufacturing and marketing a line of products and technologies containing technologies invented, designed, developed and in some cases patented by Motorola Solutions.
The complaints can be accessed at https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/presskits/motorola-solutions-intellectual-property.htm.
Apparently, Motorola thinks that Hytera is infringing on several features associated with Motorola’s MOTOTRBO (aka DMR) radios, including:
- Voice-Operated Transmission (VOX);
- Telemetry;
- Dynamic Mixed Mode (DMM) priority scan;
- Location-based services;
- GPS Revert Channel;
- Digital Telephone Patch (DTP); and
- Digital emergency (“Man Down”) and “Lone Worker” capabilities.
I’m not a DMR expert, but I’m not sure that any of those features are really used by amateur radio operators. According to an article on Urgent Communications, Hytera is disputing the charges, but if it’s true that the engineers downloaded and absconded with “more than 7,000 files,” I think they’d be hard-pressed to actually claim that.
David says
The three ex-Motorola Engineers that stole Motorola’s Intellectual Property (IP) then gave or sold it to the Chinese company Hytera when Hytera hired them, are all of Chinese descent. The Engineers , Gee Siong (G.S.) Kok, Samuel Chia, and Yih Tzye (Y.T.) Kok, all currently hold senior-level positions at Hytera. Gee Motorola, you couldn’t see this coming? There’s a moral to this story: Buy American, Hire American!
Dan KB6NU says
I thought about that, too. Seems like Motorola could have vetted those engineers a little better before hiring them. I wonder if they were H1-B engineers?
ww says
The usual motorola sour grapes lawsuit just like when they suit over Tetra format for NJ transit and NYC MTA when both agencies didn’t go with motorola P25 and lost suit big time
Rich says
Maybe Motorola will lose and p25 will be open. To all digital formats need to be open an d more universal how many radios will one incident commander need to carry.
RAYMUND says
I think that Motorola is just worried because they has lost a lot on the DMR market
and they don’t want competition.