It should be interesting. Could be really bad.
It's been an issue for a while. Universities use public money to fund research which then gets packed away where it won't see the light of day and isn't allowed to benefit anyone. It's even worse when they do it with a big company like Pfizer. University takes public money and does research with private company. Private company gets the rights to the drug and charges astronomical fees to people that need it to save their life.
UW wasn't doing anything with this patent and used public dollars to create it. The knowledge should be shared with anyone looking to utilize it. Why give these institutions money to research things then sit on them and be patent trolls.
There'd have to be proof this was public money for starters. This could have been private funding. Alumni contributions, direct student payment, etc. While not privy to the internals to this case...if apple tried to use this argument, it failed. Or, they deemed it a lost cause to pursue.
Its also a patent holders' right to sit on the patent. They may lack the resources or abilities to take to production. But the core idea is theirs. This patent is not vague....its broken down by circuit and interactions between them.
Want an analogy, this is how real estate can work. See lot of land for sale. Buy it. Hopefully for a cheap price and if lucky later on down the road its value jumps. It can sit for years, gather weeds. then one day someone offers you say 4X what you paid for it. Patents can be the same way. Have a good idea, can't get the bank to sign on of the billion dollar loan to start up a production facility (a processor facility is not buying the that small shop on main street kind of deal), patent it and wait for someone to come by who can trade off some money for it.
Since this reached a verdict and looking over the patent I can gather apple did not even deviate from this recipe in the patent. That is what nailed apple it seems. Maybe next time they could reverse engineer better and redesign based on that. What most do to at least get these hearings to reach reasonable doubt.
Barring that and unless court documents show otherwise I would predict prosecution showed Barney style (as jury not tech savvy we can assume, hell some I hate C(variants) new wave developers hate mucking about in memory...and assembly language is something never learned, assembly gets real deep into memory for those not familiar with it) in a debug tool/memory reader Apple's tech following this item by item. Or so close to push the believability of coincidence.
