Apple has been arguing that it has not infringed into any of Qualcomm’s patents for its iPhone’s from day one, the chipmaker however has been asking the tech giant to cough up royalty fees for using its technology.
The case which could have been easily settled and not left to turn ugly only required the engineers at Cupertino to verify the claims, come to a consensus and agree for the compensation, besides its not that Apple couldn’t afford the fees. The case which appeared in front of the US District court in Southern California, found Apple guilty of infringing two of Qualcomm’s patent used on iPhone 7, 7, Plus, 8, 8 Plus and X. A token damage of RM31 million was awarded, even though the amount was insignificant the victory is monumental. This is not a case between David vs Goliath as both are Goliaths, but of one that smears ink on the squeaky clean Apple, which has always portrayed itself as innovator and strongly defends intellectual property rights. We suspect this was also what Qualcomm was aiming to do.
In light of recent Spotify’s filing of lawsuits against Apple for alleged monopolistic behaviour to protect iTunes by preventing Spotify to get full leverage on AppStore, the remark by Don Rosenberg could not have been made at a more opportune time when he said “Today’s unanimous jury verdict is the latest victory in our worldwide patent litigation directed at holding Apple accountable for using our valuable technologies without paying for them”.
Patent cases are long and tedious, the big boys are able to pay top legal experts to fight the case for them, but there are also those little company’s that often disappear before they can even see their filing paper reach the courts. Even Samsung, a not so small company was at one point entangled with Apple only to settle the case out of courts. In this particular case, Apple was accused of using patents belonging to Qualcomm to support different smartphone features, “flashless booting” which eliminates the cost and footprint of separate flash memory and allows a smartphone to connect to the internet quickly after being powered on.
A second patent which enables the applications on a smartphone to get their data to and from the internet quickly and efficiently by acting as a smart “traffic cop” between the applications processor and the modem and the third patent which enables high performance and rich visual graphics for games while increasing a smartphone’s battery life. These patents are outside of the modem processors and are not essential to practice any cellular standard, which Apple argued otherwise. Its mind boggling how top executives at the largest smartphone company in the world can see pass the infringement and continue to include the patented features in their phones. The case leaves bare for all everyone to see the intricacies of patent wars, legal battles and the ugly sides of technology.
Now that the dust has settled, the whole incident arrives at painful point for us to know that even those who preach to be holier-than-thou in the tech world, are just using it as a facade to fool consumers. Remember this is just the first of many pending litigation has been filed by Qualcomm, there are more cases coming up in China and Germany against Apple, the verdict here will surely influence those as well.
