This article comes from the WeChat public account: HyperAI super neural (ID: HyperAI) , author: nerve knife, title figure from: vision China

A four-year patent dispute has finally come to an end.

The California Federal Court announced on May 19 that Apple and Cisco will receive US $ 2.3 million and US $ 1.9 million in legal fees, respectively, and the court also said the lawsuit “should not have been filed.”

Patent disputes that began four years ago

The initiator of the incident is a small company established in 2013, Straight Path IP Group (hereinafter referred to as Straight Path) .

Straight Path is Straight Path CommunicThe patent subsidiary of ations, whose parent company is under 10 people, mainly studies the millimeter wave spectrum technology in mobile communications, and was acquired by the US mobile operator Verizon in 2018.

At present, the official website of Straight Path is no longer accessible

Because Straight Path holds several patents in communications, it has also become a bargaining chip between Apple and Cisco.

In 2016, Straight Path filed an infringement claim against Cisco, and subsequently initiated a similar lawsuit against Apple for the technology in FaceTime video calling. It is claimed that both companies have infringed their Internet Protocol voice technology patents.

Specifically, Straight Path believes that both products infringe four patents related to peer-to-peer Internet communications.

Straight Path peer-to-peer network agreement patent

The contents include: (1) The first computer program queries the connection server to determine whether the second computer program is currently connected to the network; (2) If the second computer program is connected to the network, obtain its existing Network address in order to establish the required point-to-point communication when seeking.

In fact, Straight Path also took these patents and sued several companies, including American television brand Vizio and telecommunications company Sipnet.

For this reason, Straight Path asked Apple to compensate USD 95 million and Cisco to compensate USD 41 million.

A lawsuit that should not be brought?

But did these two really infringe patent rights? The court’s foothold was to define some professional terms in patents.

At first, the Federal Circuit ruled that it was not infringing, and believed that Straight Path’s interpretation of patent terms was too broad, and the two technologies did not infringe their rights.

However, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) agreed to Straight Path ’s point of view when it returned to the re-examination and proposed refinement Suggestions for explanation and scope of professional terminology.

Straight Path, after being affirmed by PTAB, filed a lawsuit against Apple and Cisco again.

Screenshot of the 2016 indictment

But in the court ’s view, Straight Path has twice submitted narrow interpretations to the Federal Circuit to prove the validity of the patent, and finally used a broad concept to sue Apple and Cisco.

This strange operation made the evidence they provided in court simply untenable. The specific details are not stated one by one, and in the years that followed, the parties to the lawsuit conductedSeveral matches.

Finally, Straight Path lost the lawsuit, paying Apple and Cisco for the attorney ’s fees in the lawsuit. The two are also very welcome. The lion asked for a total of nearly 10 million US dollars: Apple 4.5 million US dollars, Cisco 5.3 million US dollars.

On May 19, this patent dispute case was closed. Under the reasonable suggestion of the judge, the final compensation was reduced to US $ 2.3 million and US $ 1.9 million.

The judge of the final trial, William Alsup, is closing

The judge in the trial said, “One day four years ago, this lawsuit should not have been filed, but it has finally subsided.”

Patent disputes are becoming more common

In recent years, with the increasing importance of intellectual property, patent disputes have also increased. For a big company like Apple, in the first quarter of 2019 alone, it encountered several lawsuits:

On January 16, in the patent lawsuit between Apple and intellectual property licensing company Virnetx, Apple lost the lawsuit, and the total amount of patents involved was as high as US $ 440 million.

On January 24th, Apple was sued by a “patent rogue” company for alleged Bluetooth infringement.

On March 15, a US court ruled that Apple ’s iPhone X and other models infringed Qualcomm ’s patents and initially awarded US $ 31 million in compensation.

On March 19, Apple was sued by four manufacturers. The patents involved were related to the Apple Lightning interface.

This does not include the other two big factories and threeStar and Qualcomm, and Apple have long-lasting patent grudges.

In April 2019, Apple and Qualcomm settled a patent lawsuit, and the two parties reached an agreement to waive more than 50 lawsuits

These phenomena have also increased the number of patent applications. According to the report published by the World Intellectual Property Organization This article comes from the WeChat public account: HyperAI super neural (ID: HyperAI) , author: nerve knife