A U.S. appeals court to threw out a jury verdict agains Apple and Broadcom on Friday that would’ve required the companies to jointly pay $1.1 billion for infringing California Institute of Technology (CalTech) patents related to Wi-Fi technology for Apple devices.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the award, one of the largest in U.S. history for a patent case, was not justified by the evidence, and ordered a new trial.
A Los Angeles federal jury found in 2020 that millions of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other devices using Broadcom chips infringed Caltech’s data-transmission patents.
The jury awarded Caltech $837.8 million from Apple and $270.2 million from Broadcom.
Apple and Broadcom raised several issues on appeal, including the court’s understanding of the patents, its decision to disallow some defenses, and the amount of damages.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in December, “All of the university’s claims against Apple simply resulted from using Broadcom’s chips, which is why Apple says the company is ‘merely an indirect downstream party.’ If anybody, Broadcom should be on the hook for this Caltech patent litigation, not Apple.”
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