A Southern California jury has awarded Canadian patent holding company WiLan $145.1 million in an ongoing patent dispute with Apple, WiLan announced today.
Apple's iPhones were found to infringe on two patents (No. 8,457,145 and No. 8,537,757) related to wireless communications technology.
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WiLan, a company owned by Quarterhill, describes itself as "one of the most successful patent licensing companies in the world."
Apple's legal dispute with WiLan has been going on since 2010, when WiLan claimed Apple had violated one of its Bluetooth related patents. In a case separate from today's, WiLan had demanded $248 million in damages from Apple, a battle that it lost in 2013 when a a jury ruled in Apple's favor.
Tag: Patent lawsuits
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Well, don’t they just sound like an upstanding, productive corporate citizen... /sWiLan, a company owned by Quarterhill, describes itself as "one of the most successful patent licensing companies in the world”
I don't have the same problem others have with patent holding companies since patents are property to be bought and sold. One wonders how many patents they purchase to win the occasional large public jury award. I suspect the rate of return is not crazy big.
Patent holding companies are part of the problem because they are non practicing entities.AMD makes an x86 chip. intel says “we own the x86 instruction set.”
AMD says “you make chips using x86-64, and we hold the patent.”
An agreement is reached and innovation continues.
Patent holding companies are just lawsuit engines stifling innovation. They would be LESS trouble if bs patents weren’t being awarded, like Amazon’s patent on photographing a subject against a white background (yes, it’s real) in spite of the fact that there is prior art for more than 100 years before Amazon was formed.