Apple fails to invalidate Caltech patent tied to $1.1B lawsuit
Apple's bid to invalidate a California Institute of Technology patent that lies at the heart of a $1.1 billion patent infringement verdict was quashed on Thursday, leaving the tech giant on the hook for $838 million.
Logic board from Apple's first iPad, released in 2010. | Source: iFixit
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a 2018 decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that upheld the validity of U.S. Patent No. 7,116,710, granted to Caltech in 2006, reports Bloomberg Law. Apple in a parallel filing challenged the wireless technology patent covering data coding systems on grounds that the invention is obvious and therefore not eligible for protection under patent law.
The '710 patent was one of four Caltech properties leveraged in a 2016 lawsuit that claimed Apple and Broadcom infringed on valuable IRA/LDPC encoding and decoding technology. As it applies to Apple devices, the patents-in-suit cover chips supporting 802.11n and 802.11ac wireless technologies.
In January, a federal jury sided with Caltech and in a verdict awarded the university $1.1 billion in damages and potential royalties.
During the trial Caltech's lawyers argued a hypothetical licensing deal in 2010 for chips used in iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and other products would have brought in some $1.40 per device from Apple and 26 cents each from Broadcom. That calculation was adopted by the jury to level an $838 million fine for Apple and accompanying $270 million fine for Broadcom.
Apple tried to counter the claims by saying it used common Wi-Fi chips supplied by Broadcom, suggesting it was not responsible for the development of encoding and decoding solutions that might infringe on Caltech's IP.
Both companies plan to appeal the ruling.
Logic board from Apple's first iPad, released in 2010. | Source: iFixit
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a 2018 decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that upheld the validity of U.S. Patent No. 7,116,710, granted to Caltech in 2006, reports Bloomberg Law. Apple in a parallel filing challenged the wireless technology patent covering data coding systems on grounds that the invention is obvious and therefore not eligible for protection under patent law.
The '710 patent was one of four Caltech properties leveraged in a 2016 lawsuit that claimed Apple and Broadcom infringed on valuable IRA/LDPC encoding and decoding technology. As it applies to Apple devices, the patents-in-suit cover chips supporting 802.11n and 802.11ac wireless technologies.
In January, a federal jury sided with Caltech and in a verdict awarded the university $1.1 billion in damages and potential royalties.
During the trial Caltech's lawyers argued a hypothetical licensing deal in 2010 for chips used in iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and other products would have brought in some $1.40 per device from Apple and 26 cents each from Broadcom. That calculation was adopted by the jury to level an $838 million fine for Apple and accompanying $270 million fine for Broadcom.
Apple tried to counter the claims by saying it used common Wi-Fi chips supplied by Broadcom, suggesting it was not responsible for the development of encoding and decoding solutions that might infringe on Caltech's IP.
Both companies plan to appeal the ruling.
Comments
"A serial concatenated coder includes an outer coder and an inner coder. The outer coder irregularly repeats bits in a data block according to a degree profile and scrambles the repeated bits. The scrambled and repeated bits are input to an inner coder, which has a rate substantially close to one."
I'm hoping on appeal they reassess the damages. The technology would not have been licensed to Apple. It would have been licensed to Broadcom. Unless as @Iqatedo said above Apple and Broadcom developed the chip together. In that case they're s***w*d.
Unfortunately for Apple as the defendant that's the way patent law works.
That's exactly how it works, and in my obviously uninformed opinion, Apple's legal team seems to chalk up more losses than wins, and when they do win, their opponent gets a slap on the wrist and carries on doing what landed them in court in the first place.
cost of every device combined.
I am also rather tired of the nonsense argument that it’s IP and it’s always been this way - take this to the logical extension: Apple could never produce another device and become *more* profitable by just turning into an R&D lawsuit machine, then reinvesting those funds into further patent development and aggregation. It would be utterly formidable and completely legal and “ok”.
Yes, that's how infringement works. Even if it's Broadcom's chips which are responsible for the infringement - and even if Apple didn't know they infringed - Apple is guilty of infringing the patents. For that matter, we're guilty of infringing the patents if we use that functionality of our iPhones. But Caltech isn't, for obvious reasons, going to sue us.
That said, it's likely that Broadcom's contract with Apple requires it to indemnify Apple in a situation like this.
Apple wasn't found guilty of willfully infringing the patents. So it may not have known that Broadcom's chips infringed.
In that sense, it's in much the same situation that we - those of us who use iPhones and other Apple devices - are in. We are infringing patents without knowing that we are. Why would we do that?
ideas in a complex system. Courts haven't figured this out, leaving it to lay juries to judge the patent in parallel with USPTO
re-examinations, leaving it to juries to come up with random number awards, etc. Plus the double dipping exhibited in this broadside
is getting old. In the old days a parts supplier would indemnify the chip user against patent violations. But Apple is such a
deep pockets target the patent holder just might win the lottery of taking a grossly exaggerated percentage of the sales for an
incremental improvement on ideas covered in standard textbooks, in this case concatenated coding.