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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Apple and Broadcom have been told to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a beefy billion bucks for ripping off three of the US university's Wi-Fi patents. A federal jury in Cali decided on Wednesday that technology described in the data signal encoding patents owned by Caltech is used in millions of iPhones without wireless chip designer Broadcom nor phone slinger Apple paying the necessary licensing fees. Broadcom supplies radio communications components to Apple for various iThings.
The jury took just under five hours to decide its $1.1bn patent-infringement prize following a two-week trial, with Apple being forced to pick up the bulk of the damages, $837m, compared to Broadcom's $270m. The figures were what Caltech asked for.
[...] Despite the massive award, the news had no noticeable impact on Apple's share price coming a day after it announced better-than-expected results. Broadcom's slipped just a quarter of a per cent.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @02:15AM
A vast amount of research is publicly funded, even if the institution is private. I don't have the patience to dig through who-knows-what amount of stuff to find the original publications, but I bet it'll say something like "this research was funded by DARPA grant #abc123" or similar somewhere.
OTOH should multibillion-dollar corporations be allowed to profit from taxpayer-funded research? It's not like either Apple or Broadcom are short of money to pay a license fee.