Apple has won a reversal in a court case worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals tossed a decision that awarded the University of Wisconsin’s patent licensing business $234 million in damages. The original decision found Apple guilty of violating patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). WARF had successfully argued that the iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus used its patent for improving processor performance using a predictive model without permission.
This week, a federal judge agreed with Apple that the jurors could not have reached this conclusion given the actual evidence presented during the trial. The original $234 million judgement was increased to a total of $506 million because
Apple continued to use the technology in question in subsequent iPhones. With the original judgement now vacated, it’s not clear what, if anything, is owed to WARF. The patent, granted to WARF in 1998, expired in December 2016.
Neither Apple nor WARF commented on the latest development.
