On Monday, the Federal Circuit handed Apple a win by affirming a previous Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision to review a patent in a long-running DRM patent lawsuit saga.
In 2013, ContentGuard sued not only Apple but also Samsung Electronics and Google in 2014, claiming that the companies infringed several of its anti-piracy DRM patents. In a different case in September 2015, a jury ruled that Google did not infringe the same five patents. Samsung too was found not to have infringed in the lawsuit that ContentGuard filed against the South Korean company.
Mike Peterson for AppleInsider:
Specifically, the intellectual property in question was a group of digital rights management patents owned by ContentGuard, which were the focus of a patent lawsuit levied at Apple and other tech giants in 2013 on allegations that the companies used the IP in their content distribution platforms. Apple won its lawsuit in 2015.
The saga didn’t end there, with tech giants like Apple and Google continuing to seek invalidation via CBM reviews of ContentGuard’s DRM patents. One of those reviews ended up being instituted by the PTAB in 2016 and found that one of the ContentGuard patents was indeed unpatentable…
On Monday, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s decision, which Apple and Google argued in favor of. That will allow for the DRM patent in question to be reviewed for eligibility.
MacDailyNews Take: So, in a nutshell, the saga continues.
lawyers win again