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Apple Ordered to Pay $22 Million to Patent Firm Acacia Research

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A federal jury in Tyler, Texas has ordered Apple to pay $22.1 million to patent firm Acacia Research for violating U.S. Patent No. 8,055,820, related to cellular network technologies, according to court documents filed electronically this week. The monetary award is a running royalty for Apple's infringement through March 2016.

iphone-5s-acacia-research.jpg

The jury said Apple did not prove with clear and convincing evidence that any asserted claims of the patent are invalid as obvious or based on improper inventorship. Apple's infringement was found to be willful, which in patent litigation means the patent holder can request that the judge enhance the damages by up to three times, or up to roughly $66.4 million in this particular lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed in January 2014, accused Apple of selling multiple products that infringe upon the patent, including the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad Air, iPad mini, and iPad mini 2. U.S. Patent No. 8,055,820, titled "apparatus, system, and method for designating a buffer status reporting format based on detected pre-selected buffer conditions," is highly technical and at one point was assigned to Nokia.

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Boost Mobile were also named as defendants for selling the infringing iPhones, but none of the carriers were named in the jury verdict. U.S. Magistrate Judge K. Nicole Mitchell presided over the case in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, a popular region for non-practicing entities like Acacia Research and VirnetX to bring patent litigation against companies like Apple.

Acacia Research, based in Newport Beach, California, says it has returned over $705 million to patent owners. The corporation creates a subsidiary company for each set of patents it enforces through litigation, including Cellular Communications Equipment, LLC in this particular Apple lawsuit.
Our partnership with patent owners is the cornerstone of our corporate strategy. Acacia is an intermediary in the patent marketplace unlocking financial value in patented inventions.
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Apple has not confirmed if it will appeal the decision.

Article Link: Apple Ordered to Pay $22 Million to Patent Firm Acacia Research
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/16/apple-ordered-to-pay-22-million-acacia/
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These are the ones that are ridiculously silly. A little reform is needed. Maybe they need to go to a model like drugs where the parent is good for say 5-10 years on these broad ones.
 
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They can stall and appeal for the next 10 years. Otherwise kids open your wallet and hand over your money to apple because they and not paying it, you are.
 
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Big tech companies knowingly use unlicensed patented technology when they know it will earn them billions of dollars in a future product. It's just a matter for the courts. What's a few tens of millions in royalty payments and fines when you're gunna make billions? Nothing.
 
Was the patent holder doing anything with their invention? Was it a patent that Apple staff found in the US Patent Office? Did Apple staff read about the invention in some sort of journal? What was the publication? Did the inventor offer to sell it to Apple, with Apple declining and reverse engineering it?

What made the infringement willful?

I don't see answers to any of those questions. Doing a google search, all I could find was the same information on multiple sites. They read like a press release from this Acacia Research company.
 
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rjohnstone said:
Technically no.
Unlike patent holding companies, these guys don't actually own the patents.
They are intermediaries for the patent owners.
They get a cut of any settlement/judgement.
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No, they are patent trolls. Patent holding companies and patent assertion companies are considered patent trolls; not all, but most of them are. Acacia, by some accounts, is considered the #8 most dangerous patent troll. Their penchant for forming multiple LLC's for suing companies is pretty trolly. Licensing their patents isn't even a safeguard against being sued by one of their "subsidiaries". Both Apple and Microsoft have licensed patents from Acacia only to be sued later.

CrystalQuest76 said:
Was the patent holder doing anything with their invention? Was it a patent that Apple staff found in the US Patent Office? Did Apple staff read about the invention in some sort of journal? What was the publication? Did the inventor offer to sell it to Apple, with Apple declining and reverse engineering it?

What made the infringement willful?

I don't see answers to any of those questions. Doing a google search, all I could find was the same information on multiple sites. They read like a press release from this Acacia Research company.
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Afaik the original patent holder of 820 was Nokia, so the patent is valid. All your other questions are moot since Apple was already familiar with Acacia's patent portfolio as Apple had already been a licensee of some of their patents. IANAL, but willful infringement implies knowledge of the patent in question and unlicensed use regardless of that knowledge. If it helps you any, Acacia asserted 5 patents and only 820 passed the sniff test.
 
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What is "wilful infringement" and what is "apparatus, system, and method for designating a buffer status reporting format based on detected pre-selected buffer conditions"? Genuinely interested to know.
 
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It'd probably cost Apple more in lawyer/legal fees to repeal than to just pay out.
 
smacrumon said:
What is "willful infringement"
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Basically a jury starts things by determining from the evidence if a defendant knew (or should have known) that they were infringing. Often this is because the defendant was told about the patent. Apple themselves have sometimes been found to be willful because they had previously tried to patent the same thing!

THEN it's totally up to the judge to decide if there should be an additional penalty (up to three times the award) or not. To do this, the judge decides whether a reasonable person would have considered that there would be a high likelihood of infringing a valid patent.

For example, in one Apple-Samsung trial, the jury decided that Samsung had willfully infringed some of Apple's patents. But the judge refused to triple the awards, because she felt that a reasonable observer (not the defendant!) would not have expected Apple's patents to be found valid.

Note that what the defendant actually thought does not matter. Only what the judge thinks, matters. What's the difference? Consider if you got a ticket for driving 45 in a 35 mph zone, but you had thought the speed limit was only 25 mph. So are you actually guilty of being 20 mph over the limit, since that's what you believed you were doing? No, because what you thought was the infringing act does not matter. Likewise it does not matter if you thought the speed limit was 55 mph. All that matters is what an outside observer would've thought.

and what is "apparatus, system, and method for designating a buffer status reporting format based on detected pre-selected buffer conditions"? Genuinely interested to know.
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In GSM 3G HSUPA, buffer and power status reports need to be constantly uplinked from the phone to the cell system.

This patent is about choosing the best status report method each time. E.g. if the uplink bandwidth at that moment is bad, a shorter report is better. Conversely, there are times when the longer report makes more sense.
 
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shanson27 said:
Patent trolls
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And if they are, so what? What makes patent trolls bad? Cause of the name?

You know the "patent trolls" paid the original inventor for the patent. That is more than what Apple did for the original inventor. Apple paid the current owner nothing and the original inventor nothing. Why should Apple get to use the patent just because the owner of the patent isn't making something with it. The owner of the patent can do anything they want with it.

Complaining about how long a patents last is a valid complaint. Complaining about someone doing nothing with their property is stupid.
 
leroypants said:
Obviously, anyone who sues Apple for stealing a patent is a patent troll and anyone who Apple sues for stealing a patent is 100% guilty all the time no questions asked.
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Apple generally engages in litigation over the unlawful use of Apple trademarks and copyrights such as product names, like iPod or iPhone. Apple is also a large company that, as a matter of business, does not "go after" smaller companies for the sake of monetary raiding. Companies like Acacia and similar entities that attack larger companies using patent law loopholes for monetary gain are not Robin Hoods...they are TROLLs. Do your research on Apple and their litigation history before making general comments based upon your biases. If you have some negative specific comments about Apple's patent or copyright litigation, i would like to hear them.
[doublepost=1474076868][/doublepost]Apple generally engages in litigation over the unlawful use of Apple trademarks and copyrights such as product names, like iPod or iPhone. Apple is also a large company that, as a matter of business, does not "go after" smaller companies for the sake of monetary raiding. Companies like Acacia and similar entities that attack larger companies using patent law loopholes for monetary gain are not Robin Hoods...they are TROLLs. Do your research on Apple and their litigation history before making general comments based upon your biases. If you have some negative specificcomments about Apple's patent or copyright litigation , i would like to hear them.
 
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kdarling said:
In GSM 3G HSUPA, buffer and power status reports need to be constantly uplinked from the phone to the cell system.

This patent is about choosing the best status report method each time. E.g. if the uplink bandwidth at that moment is bad, a shorter report is better. Conversely, there are times when the longer report makes more sense.
Click to expand...

hmm, stuff like this supposed to be part of 3GPP Rel6 to have support for this shorter/longer reports on the cellular network.
 
thekev said:
That will hurt Apple more than it will help them.
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How would that be? Of the big companies, I always thought the biggest patent troll was Google, who demanded four billion dollars from Microsoft for some MP3 related patents. (Lucky enough, Google lost).
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JoEw said:
It'd probably cost Apple more in lawyer/legal fees to repeal than to just pay out.
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22 million dollars pay for an awful lot of lawyers and legal fees.
 
Marbhl said:
Apple generally engages in litigation over the unlawful use of Apple trademarks and copyrights such as product names, like iPod or iPhone. Apple is also a large company that, as a matter of business, does not "go after" smaller companies for the sake of monetary raiding.
Click to expand...

Apple is no angel when it comes to IP.

Apple has gone after both small and large companies, for both trademarks and money.

Many people remember them going after a small coffee shop called "Apple Child" in Germany, and many of us remember them actually going after a New York City recycling initiative. Yes, NYC, the original "Big Apple", called that decades before Apple Inc ever existed.

lawsuit_apple_v_cafe.png


Then there was the time that Apple suddenly removed a third party WiFi sync app from their app store, and later replaced it with their OWN WiFi sync app using almost the same icon.

wifi_sync_icon.png


Let's not even get into how Apple stole the names "iPhone" and "iOS", or how they cheated on their IP deal with Apple Records.

As for monetary gain, they tried to license their (some now invalidated) patents for things like slide-to-unlock to other phone makers for up to $40 a device (!!!), and when nobody would take them up on it, they took them to court... just like your so-called patent trolls do when someone refuses to license their own overpriced IP.

Then they had the gall to whine over paying much smaller royalties for actual IP needed to make a phone work.

license_rate1.png


Worst of all, Apple helped create one of the world's worst patent troll entities ever (Rockstar). They did this after spending billions to buy older Nortel patents. Rockstar only employed a dozen engineers dedicated to reverse engineering other companies' software to look for infringements they could sue over. Apple's part in this gives troll bashers zero moral ground to stand on.

Finally, the primary reason we see Apple get sued by patent holders so much, is because their policy is to ignore license requests until they are sued. So if you realized that Apple was using something YOU invented, you would have little choice but to sell your patent to a patent holding company large enough to try to fight Apple, because otherwise Apple would ignore you and use your IP without payment.
 
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