WARF v. Apple Jury: Pay $234 million!
Ping!
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Posted on 10/16/2015 10:10:07 PM PDT by Swordmaker
A U.S. jury on Friday ordered Apple Inc (AAPL.O) to pay the University of Wisconsin-Madison's patent licensing arm more than $234 million in damages for incorporating its microchip technology into some of the company's iPhones and iPads without permission.
The amount was less than the $400 million the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) was claiming in damages after the jury on Tuesday said Apple (AAPL.O) infringed its patent for improving the performance of computer processors.
Apple said it would appeal the verdict, but declined to comment further.
WARF praised the verdict and said it was important to protect the university's inventions from unauthorized use. "This decision is great news," said WARF Managing Director Carl Gulbrandsen in a statement.
Jurors deliberated for about 3-1/2 hours before returning the verdict in the closely watched case in federal court in Madison, Wisconsin. It was the second phase of a trial that began on Oct. 5.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
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What were the damages? This is again akin to a figure eight. The Left is a snake which consumes its tail first and eats the middle class for dinner. This is a figure 8 which produces 4 snakes by response. Nothing will be less expensive.
Probably designed by a student who gets nothing. Universities own students work. As a student at Kent State;s Architectural School, I designed a modular classroom. Bunch of them built. I got no credit.
Oh, wait.
;)
Pay up ye cheap bassturds!!!
They claim that Apple did not pay them Royalties or license a 1998 patented circuit that implements an algorithm invented under a US Government project grant to predict what a processor will need to do next (I believe there are multiple approaches to solving this) and queuing those instructions up next for processing, there-by increasing processor speeds. The in suit patent specifically states there is a public ownership component of this patent due to its funding, but WARF has sued 33 times asserting ownership and forced out-of-court settlements before trial every time, so app tusk ownership rights have apparently has never been adjudicated. Although I don't know this as a fact, I suspect Apple's position is the ownership and control of usage, if they are even using this particular algorithm and/or circuit—which I doubt, since 17 years of technological development has taken place since this circuit was designed—is really public domain due to public funding of the research under contract.
WARF's claim is that they were injured by not receiving royalties they were rightfully due. . . Because they claim this circuit was in the iPhone and iPad since the A7 processor came out in the Apple iPhone 5, four years ago. . . and Apple touted the A7 capabilities then, yet they waited until after the iPhone 5, 5s, and then 6 and multiple models of iPads and Apple TVs sold hundreds of million of units using A7, A8, and now A9 processors supposedly with this technology before filing an infringement suit?
WARF's attorney's got a jury of average citizens, chosen from the Madison Wisconsin area where WARF is located, who are not tech savvy, to agree that somewhere among the over 1,000,000,000 transistors and circuits on the proprietary Apple A7 processor, a very minor circuit—most likely using 32 bit code—from a patent granted 17 years ago did something that multiple other circuits patented since then could also do much more efficiently, using technology (now using 64 bit code and circuitry) which was not even used in 1998, to find a judgement in favor of a beloved local institution enriching their local institution of higher education.
Do you see why I'm extremely skeptical of this case and patent holding up?
Apparently WARF showed no evidence in trial they ever approached Apple to negotiate a licensing arrangement, hence no trebling of damages for "willful infringement." They just let the bill run up on the iOS devices before filing suit like a Patent Troll, and have now filed a second suit for infringement for the iPhone 6s and 6s plus, and on the not-even-yet-on-the-market iPad Pro—which cannot possibly be infringing because it is not even being sold!—which WARF AGAIN HAS, apparently, not approached Apple to offer a licensing arrangement. What does that tell you?
While I understand, this is larger. Apple is one of the richest things to be fined and taxed. Technology itself is not left or right but Apple is an example of the snake they feed, comes back to eat you.
Apple has a reputation of actually licensing or buying outright the Intellectual Property the use. . . unlike some other companies I could name you tout.
I thank you for making it more clear. I was seeing the periphery.
Perhaps this software allowed unsecured communications. Then sure they will sued for millions in our face, while.....
Go Badgers.
...Hillary Clinton is elected president.
Once,it was Who counts the votes. Now it is a tumult of votes that only go against registered voters to how they Didn’t vote for her. With the Obomacare and IRS, with registration of everything tied together there is coercion.
Whatever you mean but someday. Someday you will be in a hospital. You or yours is between care or not. They will have a record of who you voted for and more personal records. More than that, all this is spilled across the world. Why would your records be more secure than the President’s mail?
I just did a quick-down-and-dirty search for look-ahead predictive processor patents on Duch-duck-go, and got 143,000 hits for algorithms and circuits ranging back to 1962, including patents issued to Apple and IBM for both 32bit and 64 bit architecture processors, some for the PowerPC family used in the Apple Mac starting in 1998 for 32 bit, and 2003 for full 64 bit. 1998 was mainframe 64 bit. . . Windows was 32bit with some 64 bit addressing enabled but not processing in 1998. I found 64bit circuitry diagrams for processor component patents from 2005 onward, NOT licensed to WARF or any mention of them as prior art in the patent listing. Apple could have licensed any of these or used their own design. This is what is called by now “OBVIOUS DESIGN” to any general practitioner of the field, and is incorporated in ALL processor designs. It’s not patentable. . . That’s why WARF sued only small or not interested in fighting entities who’d settle out of court. In the past Apple might have done just that for a few tens of millions, looking on it as a contribution to education, but three years ago, as a matter of policy, to discourage patent trolls, if there is no case, Apple will fight, regardless of who the plaintiff is.
Thanks for your investigation making an important reply. I see only parts of what you know but it looks like Apple can beat it. I see this as the usual thing now. Tons of money goes to law firms on both sides. The plaintiff gets paid off and has to pay taxes the same way these law firms have to pay taxes. It is the same scheme to get taxes.
In the end, nothing has been produced except co2 and greater debt.
All the people with integrity are flipping burgers.
In the end, nothing has been produced except co2 and greater debt.
I found the original WARF patent and it is for a predictive storage grid system of look-ahead potential answers in order of steps to potential parallel processing programing. It is essentially a patent on CACHING and deciding what might be necessary responses to multiple sub-routines with simple potential answers as a program is processed. It will continually update the answers in the cached database as the main program processes data and exclude and discard obviously wrong data that is outside the range of potentially correct answers.
There are hundreds of different patents in this area using different approaches and Apple has a load of them, 36 to be precise that cite the WARF patent as prior art, including one referenced in a decision by the judge called the '647 patent which the judge EXCLUDED from trial, except for the later infringement value portion, after the jury had decided Apple had, or had not infringed the WARF patents.
But the '647 patent was a patent for doing the same thing and SPECIFICALLY used in the Apple A7, A8, and A9 processors—which was applied for by Apple in 2008, using 64bit technology and just recently granted during the trial, which from what I gather makes using an entirely different and much more complicated algorithm that prioritized out-of-order vector based data—which has nothing to do with the WARF patent, that was GRANTED by the patent examiner citing other Apple patent references, even though the WARF patent was cited Apple as prior art in their Application.
Apple even cited the WARF patent in its list of several hundred prior art patents and in computer processor literature in all of its patent applications which it DID in this field in the 36 Patents that Apple holds on SIMILAR techniques having to similar look-ahead predictive vector algorithm caching of parallel processing of programs in modern processors, which are among the 71 processor patents developed and granted to Apple.
The judge in the case ruled at WARF's urging to EXCLUDE from the trial all mention of these Apple patents and any cross examination ruling that Apple's expertise in such areas was irrelevant, focusing instead on the WARF patent claims that were "simple" for the Jury to understand. . . such as the ideas about what WARF claimed their "invention" did, rather than the differences of more modern computers so the jury could understand them.
He also stated that because Apple had mentioned the WARF patent in their '647 Patent, and the expert witnesses said that was normal procedure in patent applications, that it was NOT evidence of willful infringement, but he had the jury decide whether the in-suit patent was valid or not, based on their oh-so-knowledgable technical base of knowledge.
The interesting thing is the WARF patent itself says on almost every step that this is something every EVEN moderately knowledgeable practitioner of the art knows how to do. . . as they set up a database of potential answers, and ways of testing whether they were valid. . . as their "invention" scanned the main program for sub-routines that could be parallel processed and then set up criteria for keeping the answers from those sub-routines or excluding the answers as they were preprocessed, or disposing of the results as they waited the main program to catch up to when they were needed. In other words, it was "Obvious" to any regular practitioner who took the time to do it. That alone makes it NOT PATENTABLE and they say it in their patent application!
The also state in the patent that there are two owners of this patent from the beginning. . . WARF and DARPA. . . and two assignees, but they do not represent they are suing on behalf of DARPA.
Many of DARPA's computer patents passed into the public domain years ago. . . by being shared in contracts and necessary knowledge for use for advancement. In the patent events file at the end of the patent, there is only one registered suit, this one against Apple, because the previous 33 were settled out of court!
The Magistrate Judge ordered them excluded from discovery. . . but that also crippled Apple's defense because it could not show what is NOT in the schematics any more that WARF can show their circuit design—as impossible for a 32bit circuit to be in a 64bit processor— is in the schematics! Nor could either party show the proprietary Apple Codes for the same reason. Trade Secrets that must be protected for security reasons. It devolved the case to a WARF says, Apple says, case before a probably WARF biased jury in Madison, Wisconsin.
Assuming the award holds up, since the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a publicly funded institution, some of that money should be returned to the State of Wisconsin.
Then some of the money should be returned to the federal government, who funded the research in the first place.
But neither of those things will happen, that award will probably become play money for the professorial class in Madison to squander as they please on expensive toys.
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