Patent holding firm VirnetX yesterday told a federal jury that Apple should be slapped with a $532 million fine over an alleged patent infringement pertaining to FaceTime, iMessage and VPN technologies used in its products, which is nearly 45 percent higher than an initial damages award vacated last year.
According to Bloomberg, the notorious patent troll “keeps moving the boundary, asking for more and more and more,” said Apple’s lawyer.
Following its multi-year patent spat with Samsung, Apple has finally won a United States sales ban on some older Samsung smartphones, FOSS Patents reported Tuesday.
The sales ban covers certain features of some Samsung phones, but the injunction is practically useless as it affects outdated devices, not the flagship Galaxy lineup, which are no longer available in the United States.
Apple is under fire over planned obsolescence concerning the iOS 9 software update, with a new class-action lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing older iPhone models with the update, AppleInsider reported Wednesday.
Filed with a New York district court on Tuesday, the lawsuit also accuses Apple of deceptive trade practices and false advertising which assured customers that iOS 9 would run fine on older handsets dating back to four-year-old iPhone 4s models without stating that the upgrade would cripple legacy handsets severely.
Apple wants a Christmas present from Samsung in the form of an additional $180 million in supplemental damages (damages for infringements after the cutoff date of the jury trial), FOSS Patents reported this past weekend.
The iPhone maker on Christmas Eve filed a motion seeking the additional $180 million on top of the initial $548 million settlement that Samsung has agreed to pay to Apple (though a reimbursement may be demanded later).
A lawsuit centered on an iMessage issue which turned former iPhone owners' phone numbers into a black hole for text messages after making a switch to Android has been tossed out of the window by United States District Judge Lucy H. Koh, Business Insider reported this morning.
The lawsuit alleged that Apple's messaging system interfered with the delivery of texts, going as far as to suggest that Apple wiretapped those users by intercepting, and then failing to deliver, text messages sent from an iPhone to an Android phone.
The long-standing Apple vs. Samsung patent dispute has been dragging on for five years now without any meaningful resolution in sight, despite Samsung announcing a settlement payment of $548 million to the iPhone maker today.
According to patent blog FOSS Patents, even though the Galaxy maker will send the payment to Apple by December 14 it's found a loophole that would give it the right to seek reimbursement of all amounts required to be paid as taxes, and then some more.
The Apple-designed, TSMC/Samsung-manufactured A7, A8 and A8X mobile chips that power the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices released since 2013 have been found to infringe technology patents owned by the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
As a result, Apple is now facing a damages payout of $862.4 million, Reuters reported yesterday. The aforesaid chips power the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad mini with Retina display, iPad mini 3 and iPad mini 4.
The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that Apple is entitled to an injunction that would bar Samsung from using its patented technology in its devices. The decision could force the Korean manufacturer to change certain features on its smartphones and tablets.
At the heart of the matter is 3 software features that Apple has patented: slide-to-unlock on a device's touchscreen, the automatic correction of spelling errors, and quick-linking, which allows a user to do things like tap on a phone number within a body of text to place a call.
US District Judge Lucy Koh handed down final approval late Wednesday for a settlement between Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel, and their former employees. The payout is said to be worth around $415 million, and should effectively end the long-running Silicon Valley anti-poaching suit.
For context, in 2011, employees of the aforementioned tech firms filed a class action lawsuit against the companies for anti-competitive labor practices. The suit alleged the firms conspired to avoid hiring each other’s workers in an effort to curtail salaries, costing workers $3 billion in wages.
Samsung lifted trade secrets from rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), the world's #1 independent semiconductor foundry, Taiwan's top court has ruled.
According to a report published Wednesday by Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes, the court has determined that Liang Mong-song, a former senior director of research and development at TSMC, revealed TSMC's trade secrets and patents related to its advanced FinFET process technology to Samsung Electronics.
The report makes no mention of Apple, but the connection couldn't be clearer: Samsung might have been able to leverage the stolen secrets to win orders for Apple's next-generation 'A9' processor. Prior reports have posited that both Samsung and TSMC got to build Apple's A9 chips on the advanced 14-nanometer FinFET process technology which uses entirely new three-dimensional transistors.
The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied Samsung's request to reconsider the court's decision to uphold damages awarded in its patent infringement case, reports the San Jose Mercury News. The damages amount to more than $400 million.
This is just the latest turn in what seems to be a never-ending patent case between Samsung and Apple. In 2012, a jury found Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple's patents and awarded the iPhone maker $1 billion in damages, which has since been cut in half.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a 2013 decision finding Apple guilty for conspiring with publishers to raise e-book prices, reports The Wall Street Journal. As a result, the company is expected to pay a $450 million settlement it agreed to with private plaintiffs, 30+ states and the DOJ last year.
“We conclude that the district court correctly decided that Apple orchestrated a conspiracy among the publishers to raise e-book prices,” wrote Second Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston. The conspiracy “unreasonably restrained trade” in violation of the Sherman Act, the federal antitrust law, she wrote.