VirnetX Wins Another $502.6 Million Award From Apple in Patent Trial
VirnetX was today awarded $502.6 million in a patent trial against Apple, reports Bloomberg. Apple's FaceTime, iMessage, and VPN on Demand features are said to infringe on four VirnetX patents related to communications security.
Apple's legal dispute with VirnetX has spanned eight years and multiple trials thus far, and the $502.6 million awarded to the patent company today is separate from the $439 million awarded to VirnetX in October in a different trial. Today's $502.6 million jury award appears to pertain to newer versions of Apple devices that have a redesigned FaceTime protocol introduced in iOS 7 and iOS 8.
VirnetX CEO said the damages awarded, which were based on sales of upwards of 400 million Apple devices, were "fair" and that the "evidence was clear."
VirnetX originally sued Apple in 2010, alleging that Apple's FaceTime peer-to-peer connection technology infringed on its patents. VirnetX was initially awarded $368.2 million in 2012, but the original case has been wrapped up in appeals since then. In October of 2017, Apple was told to pay $439.7 million in a final judgement of the original case, which the Cupertino company said it would appeal.
Combined, Apple now owes VirnetX $942 million, but Apple is likely to appeal this most recent ruling so that may not be the final award granted to the patent company. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has also said that the patents involved in the case are invalid in separate cases that are being handled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.
A final validity ruling has not been made yet, and the outcome of that case could ultimately impact this trial. The Federal Circuit declined to put the current trial on hold despite the question of the patent validity, says Bloomberg, because it was so far along.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
They define the term "Patent Troll".
1) Actually invented something and patented it, rather than looked through existing patents and bought them;
2) Licensed it with the intention it would actually be used in a product.
"Patent Trolls" do not develop Intellectual Property - they buy existing IP that is broadly and vaguely defined to maximize it's potential applicability. They then use that "war chest" of purchased patents to sue as many companies actually making product as possible to generate income from those patents.
This tells you everything you need to know. This is where all patent trolls file, because the district is pro-patent troll.
Hence patent troll being an apt description of their business model.