Caltech wins $1.1 billion patent award against Apple and Broadcom

Master_shake_

Master_shake_

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Apple owes the California Institute of Technology $837 million for selling devices with patent-infringing Wi-Fi chips, a Los Angeles federal jury ruled on Wednesday. Broadcom, which sold the chips to Apple, owes Caltech another $270 million.

The nine-person jury in the US District Court for the Central District of California reached its verdict after a two-week trial, the Los Angeles Times and Law360 report. Apple and Broadcom plan to appeal the decision.

The patents claim irregular repeat-accumulate codes, a mathematical technique for encoding data that allows it to be reconstructed if some bits are scrambled during transmission. Error-correcting codes have been used in communications networks for decades, but IRA codes offered a better tradeoff between robustness and decoding time than previous techniques. Researchers at Caltech published a paper about the technique in 2000 and filed several patent applications around the same time.

IRA codes were introduced to the Wi-Fi standard with the adoption of 802.11n in 2009. Millions of Broadcom chips—and Apple devices containing those chips—have incorporated the algorithms since then. The devices at issue include iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks.

Neither Apple nor Broadcom licensed Caltech's patents, and Caltech argued the companies owed hundreds of millions of dollars as a result. The defendants, however, argued that Caltech's patents shouldn't have been granted in the first place. They pointed out that other researchers developed and published similar error-correcting codes in the late 1990s and argued that Caltech's algorithms were obvious extensions of that prior work.

But those arguments didn't persuade the patent judges who heard them. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board, part of the US Patent Office, rejected Apple's efforts to invalidate the patents as obvious. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld that decision last November.

During the trial, Broadcom and Apple argued that its implementation of error-correcting codes wasn't covered by Caltech's patents.

"There's not a shred of evidence showing that Broadcom said, 'Let's use Caltech's invention,'" a defense lawyer argued earlier this month. "That just never happened. The first time that Broadcom heard about these patents was when the lawsuit was filed."

But accidental patent infringement is still infringement. And the jury determined that Broadcom's implementation was covered by Caltech patents.
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...lion-patent-award-against-apple-and-broadcom/

they really gotta stop people from patenting prior art this is really getting out of hand.

this is is hilarious though

from the ARS comments.

One of the main Caltech researchers,Hui Jin, admitted during the trial that he never had thought of using the patented concept for WiFi until he was told that Broadcom had infringed the patent, go figure.
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"There's not a shred of evidence showing that Broadcom said, 'Let's use Caltech's invention,'" a defense lawyer argued earlier this month. "That just never happened. The first time that Broadcom heard about these patents was when the lawsuit was filed."

But accidental patent infringement is still infringement. And the jury determined that Broadcom's implementation was covered by Caltech patents.
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100% this. Due diligence is a thing. If they could prove that they looked, and could not find any patents on the idea, that'd be one thing. But "I never heard about it" is not a valid excuse.
 
So basically its a slap on the wrist, Apple and Broadcom will write these off as a loss and make it back in tax breaks.
 
Dark12 said:
What would be an appropriate punishment?
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For the infraction this was more than appropriate... Apple shouldn’t have even been named, yeah they used it but it’s not like they said “hey those chips are using stolen tech, we want those ones”. You buy something you assume the people selling them did their due diligence on making them. Imagine a world where you go to Costco and buy something then sell it a few years later at a garage sale only to get sued because that company who made it violated a patent...
 
Lakados said:
For the infraction this was more than appropriate... Apple shouldn’t have even been named, yeah they used it but it’s not like they said “hey those chips are using stolen tech, we want those ones”. You buy something you assume the people selling them did their due diligence on making them. Imagine a world where you go to Costco and buy something then sell it a few years later at a garage sale only to get sued because that company who made it violated a patent...
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Yeah, Apple stands a chance in appeals, but not broadcom. Apple may lose an appeal if they specifically requested a chip be made with the infringing tech and knew they had no license, but even that's a stretch.
 
Nobu said:
100% this. Due diligence is a thing. If they could prove that they looked, and could not find any patents on the idea, that'd be one thing. But "I never heard about it" is not a valid excuse.
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the IEEE is more at fault than broadcom.

who is the keeper of wifi standards again?

pretty certain that broadcom has to adhere to their standards to get the IEEE 802.11 sticker on their box.
 
Master_shake_ said:
the IEEE is more at fault than broadcom.

who is the keeper of wifi standards again?

pretty certain that broadcom has to adhere to their standards to get the IEEE 802.11 sticker on their box.
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The IEEE doesn't define the implementation, there is wiggle room for the various pieces, and this one (error correction) was implemented in a way which infringed on a patent.
 
Unless Apple was involved in the design, being a customer of an infringing product doesn't make you a target for litigation. They can sue, sure, but it would get tossed and of course, Apple has the deep pockets to actually defend itself. A normal company might not have alot of $$$ and choose to settle instead #cashmoneyshakedown.

Though I don't know all the details, it definitely looks like Broadcom will get hit. If the university properly patented the math / technical process, even if it wasn't in relation to wifi in particular, Broadcom could still be sued for not doing enough due diligence (as has been said, ignorance of a thing isn't a legal defense).

The thing that gets me though is that as soon as a lawsuit was initiated, Broadcom should have checked and if wrong, tried to settle on some kind of licensing scheme with Caltech. Being stubborn in an IP fight is only going to make the IP lawyers rich. Everyone else is going to be a loser.
 
Lakados said:
For the infraction this was more than appropriate... Apple shouldn’t have even been named, yeah they used it but it’s not like they said “hey those chips are using stolen tech, we want those ones”. You buy something you assume the people selling them did their due diligence on making them. Imagine a world where you go to Costco and buy something then sell it a few years later at a garage sale only to get sued because that company who made it violated a patent...
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Get your point, but that will be where Apple turns around and sues Broadcom for selling patent infringing chips and for the fines they (should, but probably won't) pay here.

Nobu said:
Also worth noting: The IEEE has a patent policy, and that is: it is not their responsibility to determine or obtain licenses for patents required to implement their specifications.

I would assume that broadcom agreed to these terms when they requested validation against their spec, or joined their working group.
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Yup. They didn't even try to do their due diligence. They should make them pay up now, even if it does go into an appeal... the dragging shit out for years in the courts is BS. Even if they paid up and the money was put in a trust fund or something. Pay up, or stop being allowed to do business. Halt all shipments of iPhones, iPads, Broadcom offending products and let them sit on the docks paying rent... see how long they want to draw this shit out then.
 
Nobu said:
100% this. Due diligence is a thing. If they could prove that they looked, and could not find any patents on the idea, that'd be one thing. But "I never heard about it" is not a valid excuse.
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Yup, it's one thing for a guy working in his garage on something to not know a patent existed, it's another for companies of these size who spend enormous amounts of money lobbying for beneficial laws to not spend money in researching if something they "come up with" had already been "come up with"
 
Lakados said:
For the infraction this was more than appropriate... Apple shouldn’t have even been named, yeah they used it but it’s not like they said “hey those chips are using stolen tech, we want those ones”. You buy something you assume the people selling them did their due diligence on making them. Imagine a world where you go to Costco and buy something then sell it a few years later at a garage sale only to get sued because that company who made it violated a patent...
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But to your point, if a company gave you a Cease and Desist order for the sale of said patent infringing item being sold and you told them to "go pound sand, I'm doing it anyways" then you would in fact be liable. It's the same as if you bought something stolen, and then tried to sell a stolen object and got caught.

Now who knows how the events played out, or if Apple was even informed of the tech they were using as illegal, but considering Apple has in the past told people to "pound sand" when a claim of patent infringement has been brought forth, I do kind of think it's reasonable to assume this did in fact happen, hence yeah they should be a fault.
 
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