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Apple Wins Appeal in Wisconsin Patent Lawsuit

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Back in July 2017, U.S. District Judge William Conley ordered Apple to pay $506 million to the University of Wisconsin's Alumni Research Foundation for infringing on a patent related to computer processing technology in the company's A7, A8, and A8X chips. Conley had added $272 million on top of an existing $234 million in damages that a jury ordered Apple to pay in 2015, around when the lawsuit originated.

Today, Reuters reports that Apple has managed to persuade a federal appeals court to throw out at least part of the lawsuit, namely the $234 million in damages.

According to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, no reasonable juror could have been able to find infringement based on the evidence that was presented in the liability phase of the trial in 2015, leading to its decision. It's unclear why the original $234 million damages award has been appealed, but without any mention of the $272 million extension being thrown out.
Apple Inc persuaded a federal appeals court on Friday to throw out a $234 million damages award in favor of the University of Wisconsin's patent licensing arm for infringing the school's patent on computer processing technology.

[The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals] said Apple deserved judgment as a matter of law in the case brought by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
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During the trial, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation originally asked for damages worth $862 million, but lowered the request to around $400 million. The patent in question, titled "Table based data speculation circuit for parallel processing computer," was originally granted in 1998 and covers a method for improving processor efficiency. It lists several current and former University of Wisconsin researchers as inventors.

Article Link: Apple Wins Appeal in Wisconsin Patent Lawsuit
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/09/28/apple-wins-appeal-wisconsin/
Applying the plain and ordinary meaning of the term “particular,” and drawing all reasonable inferences from the evidence in favor of WARF, we hold that no reasona- ble juror could have found literal infringement in this case. As explained above, each entry in Apple’s LSD prediction table includes, among other things, a load tag and a prediction. Each load tag is generated by hashing information about a load instruction, such as its address, down to a 12-bit load tag. Only 4,096 load tags are possi- ble. And because of the way Apple’s hashing algorithm is designed, multiple load instructions may hash to the same load tag. Each load tag can therefore be associated with a group of load instructions—namely, all of the load instructions that hash to the same load tag. The practical effect of this is that a given load instruction’s history will impact the prediction associated with all load instructions that hash to that same load tag.
[doublepost=1538152186][/doublepost]WARF’s second argument for upholding the jury verdict appears to be that, even if the prediction must be associated with a single load instruction, the products still infringe in at least some circumstances—i.e., those in which aliasing does not occur. Appellee’s Br. 15–18. Certainly, a product that “sometimes, but not always, embodies a claim nonetheless infringes.” Broadcom Corp. v. Emulex Corp., 732 F.3d 1325, 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (alteration omitted) (quoting Bell Commc’ns Research, Inc. v. Vitalink Commc’ns Corp., 55 F.3d 615, 622–23 (Fed. Cir. 1995)). But after reviewing the evidence and drawing all reasonable inferences in favor of WARF, we find that there is insufficient evidence to support WARF’s theory that Apple’s load tags are sometimes associated with a single load instruction.
 
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so it's not clear what happened to the $$ award? they threw out half of it?

still ~$200M is a pretty good payout - at UW the inventors get 20% which is damn good compared to industry where they give you a nice framed certificate worth $20. i think there were something like 7 people on that patent so even 6M each is nothing to sneeze at.

i was in a different group than these guys but i think when warf went after intel, intel bought a whole bunch of other UW CS patents that were not necessarily related to speculative execution, and i got paid a little bit. i think it was only like $10k if i remember right.
 
joeblough said:
so it's not clear what happened to the $$ award? they threw out half of it?

still ~$200M is a pretty good payout - at UW the inventors get 20% which is damn good compared to industry where they give you a nice framed certificate worth $20. i think there were something like 7 people on that patent so even 6M each is nothing to sneeze at.

i was in a different group than these guys but i think when warf went after intel, intel bought a whole bunch of other UW CS patents that were not necessarily related to speculative execution, and i got paid a little bit. i think it was only like $10k if i remember right.
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No it’s all gone. The court ruled there is no infringement. Without infringement there can be no damages.
 
gotcha, somehow i didn't read the last sentence of the last paragraph.

well they still got intel's money, that i know for sure :)
 
Yep, but Intel was infringing. They funded Prof. Sohi's work and assumed that meant they had a license to use the results of his work. Unfortunately this was not true and they ended up settling with WARF out of court. So they got Intel's money twice :)
 
cmaier said:
Oh. But the patent doesnt involve claiming an equation, so whats your point?
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You dig to deep, keep it simple, it's just that I think many "things" shouldn't be patentable, 1+1=2 is not patentable, software shouldn't be patentable, the above shouldn't be patentable, that's all.
 
justperry said:
You dig to deep, keep it simple, it's just that I think many "things" shouldn't be patentable, 1+1=2 is not patentable, software shouldn't be patentable, the above shouldn't be patentable, that's all.
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Why shouldn’t a specific computer microarchitecture be patentable?
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christsay said:
Yep, but Intel was infringing. They funded Prof. Sohi's work and assumed that meant they had a license to use the results of his work. Unfortunately this was not true and they ended up settling with WARF out of court. So they got Intel's money twice :)
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We actually don’t know if they were infringing. We only know they settled. Most patent cases settle, whether meritorious or not.
 
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It would be horrifying to be on one of these juries. Just trying to understand this stuff with no background in computing would be well-nigh impossible. Even with a pretty good computing background it would be tough.
 
usarioclave said:
It would be horrifying to be on one of these juries. Just trying to understand this stuff with no background in computing would be well-nigh impossible. Even with a pretty good computing background it would be tough.
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The lawyers figure it out, and jurors are smarter than lawyers.
 
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