Apple settles patent dispute, signs license deal with SimpleAir

The terms of the license agreement between Apple and SimpleAir are confidential, but they settled the litigation SimpleAir had filed against Apple. The lawsuit was first filed in September of 2009 in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, where patent infringement suits are frequently filed in hopes of a favorable outcome.

The case was originally set to go to trial this April, but SimpleAir and Apple reached principal terms in settlement talks at the Texas courthouse, shortly before the trial was set to commence.

Those terms were presumably ironed out in the following weeks leading up to Thursday's announcement that the agreement had been finalized between SimpleAir and Apple.

In all, four patents were included in the complaint:

• U.S. Patent No, 6,021,433: "System and Method for Transmission of Data"
• U.S. Patent No. 7,035,914: "System and Method for Transmission of Data"
• U.S. Patent No. 6,735,614: "Contact Alerts for Unconnected Users"
• U.S. Patent No. 6,167,426: "Contact Alerts for Unconnected Users"

SimpleAir does not appear to have any actual products available for sale, as the company is self-described as "an inventor-owned technology licensing company." It said it has "interests and intellectual property in the wireless content delivery, mobile application, and push notification market spaces."