Apple, Broadcom win new damages trial in $1.1B Caltech patent case

AppleInsider

A U.S. appeals court has granted Apple and supply chain partner Broadcom a win by tossing out a jury verdict requiring the two companies to pay $1.1 billion for patent infringement.

Wi-Fi on iPhone

The California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, sued Apple and Broadcom in 2016 for infringing on several pieces of intellectual property related to Wi-Fi technology. In January 2020, a jury found Apple and Broadcom guilty.

Apple and its supplier then sought to overturn the results of that trial, suggesting that it had been conducted with "multiple legal errors." On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with Apple and Broadcom, stating that the $1.1 billion in damages was not justified by the evidence, Reuters reported.

The court has ordered a new damages trial that will reconsider the awarded sum, but not the patent infringement.

In its original lawsuit, Caltech claimed that Apple's iPhone, iPad, and other products infringed on Wi-Fi patents held by the university. Those patents focused on Wi-Fi codes that are meant to simplify encoding and decoding for better performance and data transmission.

Broadcom, a supplier of Apple Wi-Fi chips at the time, was also named in the patent.

Back in 2020, a jury found Apple and Broadcom guilty of patent infringement. As a result, Apple was ordered to pay $838 million and Broadcom was ordered to pay $270 million. An Apple attempt in invalidate some of the patent claims did not pan out.

Caltech, which is based in Pasadena, California, has also sued a number of other technology giants, including Microsoft, Samsung, and Dell.

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tokyojimu

What happened to universities doing research for the public good, not for profit?

GerfnitAuthor

Everyone wants to score $ for intellectual property, including universities. My former employer went after companies that violated our patents, but usually ended up with cross-licensing agreements, not money.

sbdude

tokyojimu said:

What happened to universities doing research for the public good, not for profit?

CalTech is a private institution, so its goals are less philanthropic compared to a public(ly funded) institution.  Of course, one need only google Moore v. The Regents of the University of California to see how much money a public university can make. That said, all universities in one form or another are a business pure and simple; their educational aims these days are questionable at best.

joekewe

sbdude said:

That said, all universities in one form or another are a business pure and simple; their educational aims these days are questionable at best.

I agree with your comment when applied to FOR-profit universities, but NON-profit universities are not designed to be businesses.  Yes, they charge tuition and have huge budgets, but they are not intended to generate profits.  Most are focused on their "educational aims" while generating enough income to stay afloat.

jumpingcoco

I'm a bit torn on this issue. >70% of the students, including me back in the day, received various types of intramural scholarships from Caltech, that covered about 80% of my cost. Caltech doesn't have a huge endowment like other big private schools such as Harvard, MIT, or Stanford. And fundamental research is REALLY, REALLY expensive, students' tuition can barely cover the operations cost, and you have to compete with other schools, both domestic and international. So industrial income + donation play an important role in maintaining its competitiveness in cutting-edge research. Caltech is more of a research institute than a university with with close to 3000 graduates and postdocs and only 900 undergrads, and there was even a discussion decade ago to cut the undergraduate program. So I think people should see it as a non-profit, research-focusing organization rather than "philanthropic college". Hopefully they can appeal and win something back from this case. 

wood1208

There is no such thing as non-profit. Every non-profit organization/institution have people and establishments to support whatever cause they serve.Some need more $ than others. CalTech is not non-profit institution but has played very important role in advancing science for the benefit of humanity and it's members are not super rich where many faculty members,supporting staff own big yacht, mansion,billions in bank,etc. Duke,Stanford are similar kind of institutions.

zoetmb

joekewe said:

sbdude said:

That said, all universities in one form or another are a business pure and simple; their educational aims these days are questionable at best.

I agree with your comment when applied to FOR-profit universities, but NON-profit universities are not designed to be businesses.  Yes, they charge tuition and have huge budgets, but they are not intended to generate profits.  Most are focused on their "educational aims" while generating enough income to stay afloat.

That’s not quite accurate, IMO.   Most “known” colleges (aside from the ones that advertise on TV) are non-profits and yet tuition has skyrocketed at many multiples of the inflation rate.  

Many of these schools are more interested in increasing the size of their endowment and many have highly paid, top heavy administrations filled with people who don’t teach. That’s especially true at most of the Ivy Leagues.   And many are more concerned with expanding the facilities than education.  

My first year at college cost $1300 in tuition.  That’s $10,000 in today’s dollars.  But that school today charges over $50,000 and it certainly doesn’t come to mind as one of the great educational institutions of our country.  

The big ripoff were schools that closed during the pandemic, but didn’t reduce tuition - trying to claim that an assignment sent via email or a Zoom lecture (when the professors even bothered to do so) was the same as in person instruction on a fully functional campus.   My granddaughter dropped out of college for a year because it certainly wasn’t worth spending something like $70,000 for half-hearted remote learning. 

crowley

wood1208 said:

There is no such thing as non-profit. 

You should let the IRS know, since it's a definition that they use and is widely understood.  No shareholders to disburse profits to, pretty simple.