It’s almost a year since Apple was found to have infringed a Masimo patent for low-power pulse oximeter features used in the Apple Watch.
At the time, the company was ordered to pay $634 million in damages, but a federal judge has now ordered it to pay an additional $184 million in interest …
Apple had been fighting with health tech company Masimo on a couple of fronts. The more serious of them was an International Trade Commission ruling that Apple must remove the blood oxygen feature in two Apple Watch models back in 2023 in order to allow them to be sold in the US. The Cupertino company was forced to redesign the way the feature worked in order to be allowed to bring the devices into the US.
But the company also faced a lawsuit from Masimo, seeking damages for the use of its patented approach to measuring blood oxygen in a power-efficient way. Apple was found to have infringed on this patent and ordered to pay damages amounting to the license fees it should have paid.
Bloomberg Law reports that Apple has now been ordered to pay an additional £184 million in interest on this sum.
Judge James V. Selna rejected Apple’s argument that awarding interest would constitute a windfall for Masimo, citing US Supreme Court guidance that “interest from the time that the royalty payments would have been received merely serves to make the patent owner whole.”
There was some good news for Apple. Masimo had asked for interest calculated at 7%, but the judge rejected this, saying that the interest rate should instead be equivalent to that paid on Massimo’s own borrowing. However, annual compounding still added a total of $184M to the amount due.
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