The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday asked for the U.S. Solicitor General’s views on Apple and Broadcom’s bid to revive their challenges to patents owned by the California Institute of Technology, in a dispute in which Caltech previously won $1.1 billion in damages from the companies.
The justices asked for the U.S. Solicitor General’s input on a lower court decision that prevented Apple and Broadcom from arguing the patents were invalid at trial.
Caltech, located in Pasadena, California, sued Cupertino-based Apple and San Jose-based Broadcom in 2016 in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging that millions of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other devices with Broadcom Wi-Fi chips infringed its data-transmission patents.
A jury ruled for Caltech, ordering Apple to pay $837.8 million and Broadcom to pay $270.2 million. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit took issue with the amount of the award and sent the case back for a new trial on damages, which is set to begin in June.
Apple and Broadcom also told the Federal Circuit that they should have been allowed to challenge the patents’ validity at trial. The patent-focused appeals court upheld the trial judge’s decision to block the companies from making the arguments because they could have raised them in their petitions for U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review of the patents.
The companies appealed that decision to the Supreme Court last September. They told the justices that the Federal Circuit misread the law, which they said only bars arguments that could have been raised during the review itself, not in the petition.
MacDailyNews Note: The case is Apple Inc. v. California Institute of Technology, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 22-203.
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