It might have taken several months to come into force, but it took a German court just a matter of hours to suspend a ban on the sale of several 3G equipped iPhone and iPad models in the region.

The SKUs were pulled from Apple's online store on 3 February following a Mannheim court's decision to award Motorola an injunction against several iOS devices back in December.

The ruling – made in reference to one of Motorola's FRAND patents – was suspended shortly after, however, after Apple vowed to appeal the decision.

Sale now on

"All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple's online store in Germany shortly," Apple told Slashgear in a statement.

"Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago."

On that subject, Florian Mueller of Foss Patents claims Motorola has offered to license the patent in question to Apple in return for what's believed to be 2.25 percent of all sales made from the devices in question.

It's a rate of return Mueller claims Apple considers excessive, and one the giant will look to use as evidence to prove Motorola is guilty of unfair practice.

Patently unfair

"If MMI [Motorola Mobility] asked Apple for a royalty rate way in excess of what it asked others in the industry, the question would be why that is so," concludes Mueller on his blog.

"MMI would likely argue that others also licensed standard-essential wireless patents to them.

"Apple, however, will presumably claim that MMI made Apple a prohibitive license offer that Apple couldn't possibly accept without messing up its cost structure, with MMI's alleged objective being to seek injunctive relief against Apple in order to have leverage against Apple's non-standards-related innovations."

Any licensing agreement between the two firms would hand Motorola what amounts to a patent tax on all the affected models sold – an interesting state of affairs, given the OEM's forthcoming takeover by Apple rival Google.

[source: Foss Patents]