District court rules Hytera continues to use Motorola Solutions trade secrets

Motorola Solutions (MSI) announced the recent ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that determined Hytera continues to use Motorola Solutions’ trade secrets in Hytera’s digital mobile radio H-Series products sold worldwide. Despite Hytera’s claim to have redesigned the H-Series without Motorola Solutions’ intellectual property, the District Court found that Hytera’s H-Series products are substantially similar to Hytera’s previously adjudicated DMR radios and repeaters, noting: “While Hytera publicly claimed during the H-Series’s U.S. launch that the H-Series was redesigned ‘from the ground up’ ‘in a clean room,’ Hytera did not ‘start from scratch’ in its redesign… Hytera left several Motorola trade secrets in place. Many of the changes Hytera did make were merely cosmetic… Hytera’s redesign process demonstrates that the H-Series was built on the foundation of Motorola’s trade secrets… This ensured that Hytera could continue to profit off Motorola’s designs. These replacements of lines of code with functional equivalents did nothing to change the product’s reliance on Motorola’s trade secrets.” The District Court has ordered Hytera to pay Motorola Solutions royalties of more than $59M plus more than $11M in interest for Hytera’s worldwide sales of H-Series products through the first quarter of 2024. These amounts were calculated in accordance with the District Court’s July 2022 order requiring Hytera to pay Motorola Solutions royalties of $80.32 per unit for Hytera radios and $378.16 per unit for Hytera repeaters that utilize Motorola Solutions’ stolen trade secrets and copyrighted source code. The order also requires Hytera to pay these royalties going forward on its H-Series products sold worldwide, subsequent to the first quarter of 2024. Additionally, the District Court held Hytera in civil contempt for failing to make court-mandated royalty payments to Motorola Solutions, marking the third time since 2023 that Hytera has been held in civil contempt for refusing to obey court orders.