US District Judge Leonard Davis has issued pre-trial rulings blocking Apple attempts to preemptively invalidate some VirnetX patent claims, and in other cases use invalidity as a defense, reports say. For the former, Apple’s argument had been that many of VirnetX’s claims are too vague to justify patenting, including the use of terms like “secure name service,” “secure name,” or “unsecured name.”
Davis is also preventing Apple from disputing the validity of patent claims that were the subject of the parties’ last legal battle, which resulted in a $368 million judgment in VirnetX’s favor. It can, however, use that strategy against more recent claims.
VirnetX has been pursuing Apple over FaceTime, which it insists is infringing communications patents. Although Apple actually changed FaceTime in response to the first lawsuit, VirnetX hasn’t been satisfied.
