According to the reports reaching us from our sources, Apple has been enjoined by a federal court in Texas to pay $502.6 million to a patent troll called VirnetX in view of an 8-year old legal battle over FaceTime and iMessage patents.
The fight in court between Apple and VirnetX has been on since the year 2010 when the patent holding company said that Apple ran afoul on four of its patents connected to internet-based communications. The legal battle has lasted for a very long time and it involves a large amount of lawsuits and a woozy number of appeals. The last time we heard of this feud was in October 2017 when Apple was ordered to pay $439.7 million to the patent troll, a ruling of which Apple made an appeal.
VirnetX is a patent-assertion unit, this means that it is solely into the business of suing companies that in actuality develop and sell products based on esoteric patent infringement laws and loose interpretations of intellectual property regulations. VirnetX whose base is located in Zephyr Cove, Nevada, filed its case in patent troll-friendly East Texas, a district where patent holders have had a better chance of succeeding in intellectual property cases until the Supreme Court suppressed the practice in the year 2017.
In an SEC filing, VirnetX described its approach to making money by saving its “portfolio of intellectual property is the foundation of our business model.” Our sources reported that, the company’s stock rose to 44 percent when the federal ruling was announced in its favour. Be that as it may, it appears as if the ruling may be cut down at the end of the day. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington is at the moment reviewing cases in which the Patent Trial and Appeal Board claims the patents responsible for the lawsuit are valid.
