Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Apple has won the latest round in its nine-year patent mega-battle with VirnetX – with a US appeals court rejecting a $600m jury decision and sending it back down to the district court to redecide.
The victory saw Apple’s share price go up by more than one per cent but, in an indication of their comparative sizes, VirnetX’s share price collapsed by 50 per cent on news of the decision [PDF] on Friday. As everyone has had time to digest the decision, however, VirnetX’s share price has partially recovered – in large part because Apple is still on the hook for most of the $600m award.
The lower court will now have to decide whether to hold another trial and revisit the whole issue or revise its patent award in light of the successful appeal.
At the heart of the fight are four patents that VirnetX holds that it says Apple infringes with its iPhones and iPads. All of them cover VPNs but the most recent court decision split the four in two groups, with one covering external domain names and the other covering internal network addressing.
The court decided that the first two (6,502,135 and 7,490,151) are infringed by Apple in its VPN on Demand service but that the second two (7,418,504 and 7,921,211) which are used in its popular FaceTime service are not.
That’s important for several reasons. For one, rather than pay VirnetX royalties, Apple decided to redesign how it did FaceTime on a technical level as a way to bypass the patents (in essence, it stopped using an IP address as final authorization when creating a VPN between two devices and instead uses a push token, certificate and session token). That redesign sparked its own lawsuit when Apple cut users off from FaceTime if they didn’t update their phones to use the new approach.
By negating infringement of two of the four patents, it also means that Apple will not have to pay as high an infringement fine – but it’s not at all clear what that reduction will be. Despite FaceTime being much better known, it is significantly less valuable in terms of infringement than VPN on Demand.
Currently the $596m judgement against Apple comprises a $503m award and $93m in interest and costs – tacked on because Apple has been dragging the case out; VirnetX first sued back in 2010. That award was reached by putting a $1.20 royalty for the company on the estimated 384 million units impacted.
But, the judgment notes, Apple’s own expert “asserted that VPN on Demand was vastly more valuable than FaceTime, (testifying that VPN on Demand was worth about 6 cents per unit, FaceTime about 1 cent per unit).”
That means that – if the district court accepts the decision and tries to recalculate the fine itself using Apple’s own testimony – the $596m judgment will be reduced to approximately $515m. Which, even for Apple, is a lot of money.
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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
In another chapter of the legal battle between Apple and VirnetX, a jury in Texas decided today in a 90-minute session that Apple will be required to pay an additional $502.8 million for infringing patents of the security software company VirtneX[sic].
As reported by Bloomberg, the jury had to decide how much Apple owes VirnetX in royalities for VPN on Demand. VirnetX accuses Apple of infringing on its VPN patents on iOS, which offers features to let users connect to virtual private networks on iPhone and iPad.
VirnetX argued that Apple should pay $700 million for the infractions, but Apple tried to negotiate on $113 million claiming that the royalty rate should not be more than 19 cents per unit. The jury's final decision determined that Apple would have to pay 84 cents per unit.
An Apple spokesman said he was disappointed with the result.
Previously:
After Five Losses, Apple Finally Wins A Round In $600M Virnetx Facetime Patent Mega-Battle
Apple Loses VirnetX Patent Retrial, Must Pay $302.4 Million
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @09:50PM
Vote Libertarian Republican.
Kill the poor.
Take from the young and give to the old.
Fuck you, got mine, give me yours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @10:40PM (3 children)
I've been getting a shitton of FaceTime calls this weekend from numbers I don't know. Did every sack of shit go and buy a fucking iPhone for Black Friday?
(Score: 1) by NPC-131072 on Sunday December 01 2019, @12:47AM (2 children)
No, just Justin Trudeau and he's got your number.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:28AM
We need to ban Apple from selling iPhones to Canada.
Vote Conservative! Kill the poor, eh!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:32AM
^art
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:33AM (2 children)
Capitalism: The art of making money with the work of others.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:54AM (1 child)
Unlike socialism where the ruling elite become wealthy off of the backs of their starving citizens?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by anubi on Sunday December 01 2019, @02:29AM
Pick your poison. Neither is ideal.
About the best I can hope for is a benevolent dictatorship. With one good guy whose say is it.
This just seems the way it is. Like gravity. You are a leader, a follower, somewhere in the spectrum of being a do-er to a leecher.
None of these systems are perfect.
This America / Democracy / Republic thing is yet another social experiment, modeled on the previous Greek and Roman civilizations. Like all other attempts before, it has both good and bad elements, many inseparably intertwined.
All in all, I think we have come a long way, but we are far from being done.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 01 2019, @04:26AM
Half a billion really isn't a lot of money for Apple. How many stories have we read about them just sitting on their money?
This link attempts to quantify Apple's assets - https://seekingalpha.com/article/258268-debunking-the-myths-of-apples-liquid-assets [seekingalpha.com]
Marketwatch does a better job of explaining that cash pile - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-sitting-on-216-billion-in-cash-2016-01-26 [marketwatch.com]
Basically, Apple, like every other big tech company doing business globally, plays games with their money to avoid tax liabilities. But, Apple can most certainly pay a half billion dollar settlement, overnight, without breaking a sweat.