On Monday, Apple urged a U.S. appeals court to reverse a trade tribunal’s ruling that required the removal of blood-oxygen monitoring technology from its Apple Watches to prevent a ban on U.S. smartwatch imports.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard arguments from the tech giant, medical monitoring technology company Masimo, and the U.S. International Trade Commission over the ITC’s 2023 ruling that Apple Watches violated Masimo’s patent rights in pulse oximetry technology.
Apple attorney Joseph Mueller of WilmerHale told the court on Monday that the decision had wrongly “deprived millions of Apple Watch users” of Apple’s blood-oxygen feature. A lawyer for Masimo, Joseph Re of Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear, countered that Apple was trying to “rewrite the law” with its arguments.
The judges questioned whether Masimo’s development of a competing smartwatch justified the ITC’s ruling. Apple has told the appeals court that the ban was improper because a Masimo wearable device covered by the patents was “purely hypothetical” when Masimo filed its ITC complaint in 2021.
Irvine, California-based Masimo has accused Apple of hiring its employees and stealing its pulse oximetry technology after discussing a potential collaboration.
MacDailyNews Take: The saga continues.
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Shake some lose change out of the couch cushions at Apple HQ, buy Masimo, take the blood oxygen IP and anything else Apple might want (maybe Masimo has already figured out noninvasive blood sugar monitoring or blood pressure monitoring for watches) and sell off everything else. Even a hostile take over would still leave $billions and $billions in Apple’s savings account!