This is simply incredible.
In 2012, Apple won the year’s biggest patent verdict—more than $1 billion against Samsung.
The company also lost one of that year’s biggest cases when an East Texas jury ordered it to pay $368 million to a company named VirnetX for infringing patents related to FaceTime and VPN On Demand functions used in iPhones, iPads, and Macs. VirnetX is a company some call a “patent troll” because its only business is now patent enforcement. Then, in March, US District Judge Leonard Davis ordered (PDF) an ongoing royalty to be paid to VirnetX. The number was downright stunning: 0.98 percent of revenue from iPhones and iPads sold in the US.To no one’s surprise, Apple is fighting tooth and nail to avoid this outcome. A decision (PDF) published yesterday shows that one creative strategy that Apple tried to use went too far.
The decision puts VirnetX back in the driver’s seat, in a stronger position to collect a patent tax of nearly 1 percent on the most popular product produced by the world’s richest tech company. One estimate suggests that VirnetX could soon be collecting around $340 million from Apple annually unless VirnetX’s patents are vanquished on appeal.
You could argue with the use of the term patent troll here, but there’s no arguing with the financial impact of the decision here. This is an astonishing amount of money.
Boy…karma bites hard.
On a related note, Samsung has half of the first year coming Apple’s way. 🙂
Karma, hardly.
This is why FaceTime was not Open Sourced. Apple didn’t want to have to pay for them as well.
Apple is very litigious, even irrationally so if you agree w/ Gruber. That’s the karma.
Regardless of opening up FaceTime, it looks like they’ll pay dearly for even having it.
An entirely new interface paradigm gets ripped off with no repercussions but some footnote feature is worth 1% of the entire product.
Apple really needs to figure out how to get better results in court.
Enjoy the schadenfreude. 🙂
There’s no such thing as karma, but there’s plenty of jubilation in seeing your enemies suffer.
No pleasure taken at all, seriously.
I’m sure that is true but not in relation to me. I’m hardcore Apple outside of iOS but never root against them.
Don’t take “anti-Apple” arguments as them being my enemy just ’cause I don’t beat pom poms against my chest.
Oh and regarding karma, maybe not so I’ll restate it.
When you are highly litigious in your ways then you get sued and lose, badly in this case, you got what you had coming.
Call it karma or reaping what you sow or good ol’ fashion “you had it coming”. Your choice.
I’m not judging.
Denying it is as profoundly human as feeling it.
None of that is real.
The universe does not dispense justice. We just have the tendency to assign meanings we like to unrelated and random events.
Your anti-Apple arguments are more rational than what one can hear from the regular hater but you can’t convince me there is no significant emotional part of your antagonistic stance.
🙂
No prob. We just disagree on the spirituality of life.
Of course there are emotions. With great passion comes great emotion. 🙂
That doesn’t mean I found joy in Apple losing here. I actually felt bummed a bit. Had I felt joy I would have responded with “Good”, as I have in other cases in the past.