“Apple Inc. was told to pay a Texas company $23.6 million after a jury found its iPhone and other devices used pager technology from the 1990s without permission,” Susan Decker and Dennis Robertson report for Bloomberg. “Six patents owned by Mobile Telecommunications Technologies LLC are valid and infringed, a federal jury in Marshall, Texas, said late yesterday. MTel claimed Apple’s Airport [sic] Wi-Fi products and iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices with messaging used the technology. This is the second trial in as many months in which the Cupertino, California-based Apple was accused of using pager technology without paying for it. It won the first case, involving a different company, last month in California.”
“Mobile Telecommunications was a pioneer in wireless messaging in the 1990s, when its SkyTel 2-Way paging system was the smartphone of its day. Now the company is the licensing arm of closely held United Wireless, which co-owns and operates the legacy SkyTel network for use by first responders and doctors,” Decker and Robertson report. “MTel claimed that Apple devices rely on foundational technology for the transmission and storing of messages and should pay royalties. The Lewisville, Texas-based company was seeking $237.2 million in damages, or about $1 per device.”
“Apple denied infringing the patents and said MTel was trying to take credit for emojis — digital icons that express emotion — and calendar invites,” Decker and Robertson report. “It also argued that the patents were invalid because they didn’t cover any new innovations even when they were first issued.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, where will Apple ever find the cash?!
(Apple currently generates roughly $28 million per hour.)