In March, a Texas Eastern District court ordered Apple to pay Personalized Media Communications (PMC) just over $ 300 million following a lawsuit for alleged DRM violations. However, the appeal of this conviction was successful and Apple obtained a conviction which overturns the verdict of March, since the judge found this company guilty of patent troll, a figure which American justice has started to take itself very seriously under the pressure of technology, the companies that suffer the most from this type of lawsuit.
As Bloomberg reports, the patent on which March’s $ 308 million ruling was based is now “unenforceable” after Apple appeals the previous ruling, so Personalized Media Communications won’t get just a dollar out of it. . You also won’t be able to sue other tech companies for the same.
Personalized Media Communications LLC’s patent for digital rights management is unenforceable because the company intentionally delayed your application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office so he can get more money later, ruled Texas District Judge Rodney Gilstrap.
PMC patent application dates back to the 1980s, but none were granted before 2010 and beyond. This strategy was seen as constituting “unreasonable delay and abuse of the patent legal system,” Justice Rodney Gilstrap said in the ruling. The method of delaying the issuance of a patent to make it more profitable when technology has adopted it massively is called submarine patent.
Gilstrap relied on a June ruling from the country’s highest patent court that facilitated the challenge of so-called submarine patents. The court had access to internal documents of the company PMC in which Apple was named as one of the “natural candidates” to be dealt with, in 1991. In the same document, in addition to Apple, there was also Intel , IBM and Microsoft.
The company has followed a strategy to make sure this and other patents have not been issued until “the crime spreads in an industry”, according to internal documents cited by the judge.
