Site icon MacTech.com

Court: Apple didn’t infringe Mirror Worlds patent

LawsuitLogo.jpg

Apple has won its appeal of a U.S. patent-infringement verdict related to a Yale University professor’s invention on how documents are displayed on a computer screen, reports “Bloomberg” (http://macte.ch/V5VGY).

Apple didn’t infringe patents owned by Mirror Worlds LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington saidTuesday in a ruling posted on its website. The court upheld a lower-court decision that tossed the 2010 jury verdict.

“The evidence was insufficient to support the jury’s finding of infringement for all of the asserted claims,” the appeals court wrote in today’s decision.

In October 2011 Apple challenged a jury verdict in which the computer maker was ordered to pay as much as US$625.5 million to Mirror Worlds for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed digitally. Apple asked U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for an emergency stay of the Oct. 1 verdict, saying there are outstanding issues on two of the three patents.

Apple said patent owner Mirror Worlds would also be “triple dipping” if it were able to collect $208.5 million on each of the patents. Apple had been ordered by a jury to pay damages to Mirror Worlds for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed on a computer screen. The federal jury in Tyler, Texas, awarded $208.5 million in damages for each of the patents infringed.

In 2008 Mirror Worlds Technologies, a Texas based company, accused Apple of violating four distinct but related patents that touch on creating “streams” of documents that are automatically sorted according to time stamps, including future dates assigned to calendars and other reminders. The company said that just about all of Apple’s product line infringes on a system for organizing data by time, “but draws its closest connection with the Time Machine backup feature in Mac OS X Leopard.”

Exit mobile version