As the court decided and people in the industry know hiring people from competitors is standard business. What you are assuming is that Apple got Masimo’s ’trade secrets’ from them. And that is telling - they aren’t claiming patent infringement in their complaints even though that is what the ITC is talking about - they are saying Apple stole ‘trade secrets’ - the special things they DON’T patent because they want them to be, well, secret.
The patent talks about an algorithm from angled sensor data to correct for variations in skin depth and you can’t patent math. All Apple should have to do is show their work creating their own algorithm and that makes the ‘trade secret’ part go away. When you hire someone else’s employees they are specifically instructed NOT to just do what their old employer did though they can use their knowledge to create a new and different version functionally similar. That Apple says they can just make a software change shows they have the raw data from their development and can create an entirely new algorithm. Misamo can’t ‘trade secret’ two different ‘ways to skin a cat’, just one.
Apple will pay for something that is uniquely suited, truly unduplicatable, or saves them a lot of work. We know they have tried to make their own communication chip and freely admit the can’t make an equivalent chip without violating the copyright of Qualcomm, so they license theirs. They saw the Shortcut app that made a programming language for iOS features and they bought it. That they are digging their heels in on this makes me think the genuinely feel that their own unique work does not infringe on the 2019 patent and I tend to think that’s true when Misamo themselves only talks about ‘trade secrets’, not the patent itself.
If its trade secrets then Apple changing their algorithm should make the problem go away. We will see.
