Bloomberg reports that a federal jury has found Apple guilty of infringing on six patents related to outdated pager technology from the 1990s. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has ordered Apple to pay a $23.6 million settlement for violating six patents owned by plaintiff Mobile Telecommunications Technologies LLC in the case.
Mobile Telecommunications Technologies claimed that several Apple products with wireless messaging were violating the pager technology, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Airport lineup of Wi-Fi products. Apple won a similar case over pager technology, involving a different company, last month in a California court.
“Apple is refusing to acknowledge the contributions of others,” MTel lawyer Deron Dacus of the Dacus Firm in Tyler, Texas, told the jury in closing arguments. “This case is about fairness.”
The report claims that the patents involved in this case were issued to MTel in the mid-to-late 1990s and either newly expired or are nearing the end of their terms. The telecommunications company was considered a pioneer in wireless messaging with its SkyTel two-way paging system in the 1990s, and the company now serves as the licensing arm of United Wireless.
The Lewisville, Texas-based company was originally seeking $237.2 million in damages, or about $1 per device. Given that the patents in this case are related to the transmission and storing of messages, it is possible that MTel could now go after other tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that have similar messaging services.
Apple denied infringing the patents because they did not cover any innovations when they were first issued. Apple lawyer Brian Ferguson reportedly told the jury that MTel was entitled to $1 million at the most.
In related news, we learned last week that Apple will have to face a federal lawsuit over text messages getting lost when switching from Apple’s iMessage to a standard text messaging service. The news came just days after Apple introduced a tool to help users remove phone numbers from the iMessage system.
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They just made that amount in less than the time it took me to write this from the interest accruing on their accounts.
So?
“This is about fairness.”
Ha! Bullsh*t lawyer-talk (and I’m a lawyer).
“This is about greed.”
Fixed it.
Yep. Greedy lawyer is a redundant phrase.
Apple needs to be held accountable for stealing the ideas of others.
It is no longer an innovative company because but has learned the sheep will buy whatever it sells, even if the technology is old.
If you want to see what Apple will have next year, look at what its competitors have today.
Totally!! Tell em how it is!!
oh do you mean like a 8 core GPU? Or a 64bit operating system? Or did you mean the actually useful and working fingerprint sensor? Oh that’s right, you meant screen size, and cut&paste, sorry my bad, those are way more innovative.
And the real difference is in most cases it actually works when Apple releases it.
Android doesn’t work? Yes, it does. So do the phones.
“Apple denied infringing the patents because they did not cover any innovations when they were first issued.”
Just like many of Apple’s patents, including a rectangle.
Apple didn’t patent any rectangle or even rounded corner…stop the crap.
No, they just won a court case based on it. Give it up ApplePhag
if only we could compare it to how Coke protects its design of the coke bottle, or how Clorox protects the design of the bleach bottle – oh wait, they do. I wonder why Apples does too? *sarcasm*
He just a Samsung parrot.
As opposed to Apple parrots? They squawk the most.
Apple claimed a patent (maybe) on a round-cornered rectangle. But *Apple themselves* has used RoundRects forever – both in software (spelling pun intended) and in their hardware. Wasn’t the original 256K Macintosh keyboard shaped like a rounded rectangle shape? Did they get a design patent *then*? If so, could it be considered that Apple actually created the “prior art” to invalidate their *current* (attempted) patent? Oh, the irony..
A lie doesn’t become true just because you repeat it often. Please learn the difference between a patent and a trade dress.
“A lie doesn’t become true just because you repeat it often.”
The Macolytes sure seem to think it does.
Once again, money is taken away from people who might help us in the future to those who would only help themselves.
“Taken away from people who might help us”?
Do you mean Apple?
This won’t hurt Apple one bit. To them, it’s the cost of doing business.
It’s another sign that Apple’s R & D is failing. Why innovate when people will line up to buy stuff that’s copied from the competition?
Cut paste repeat. We heard you the first time.