AppleInsider Staff
Apple has reached an out-of-court settlement with Intertrust Technologies, a holding company owned jointly by consumer electronics giants Sony and Philips, putting an end to a patent infringement lawsuit filed against the iPhone maker by Intertrust one year ago.
Attorneys for Apple and Intertrust notified District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Tuesday that they had reached a settlement agreement and asked that the lawsuit be dismissed. Gonzalez subsequently granted the request, dismissing all claims with prejudice and ordering that each party bear its own fees and costs. Terms of the settlement were not revealed.
Intertrust originally filed suit last March, alleging that nearly every product in Apple's lineup infringed on at least one of 15 separate Intertrust patents. Those patents, covering security and distributed trusted computing, were said to be in use on the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac computers as well as the iTunes, iCloud, and App Store services.
"Apple makes many great products that use Intertrust's inventions," Intertrust CEO Talal Shamoon said at the time. "Our patents are foundational to modern Internet security and trusted computing, and result from years of internal research and development. We are proud of our record of peaceful and constructive licensing with industry leaders. We find it regrettable that we are forced to seek Court assistance to resolve this matter."
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intertrust has previously secured patent licensing pacts with nearly every major technology company including Adobe, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, HTC, LG, Vodafone, and parents Sony and Philips. The company has had success in litigation as well, winning a $440 million settlement from Microsoft in 2004.
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8 Comments
One lawsuit down, how many to go...
Now if Florian Mueller would just pull his assets out of GOOG and realize that a few patents can mean all the difference between pwning a market and not pwning it ("Our iClone is as good as an Apple, right down to the very last feature!").
In the context of the present (and the Samgsung v Apple situation), I think what this settlement says to the world is that Apple can and will agree to reasonable out-of-court settlements over IP. (Secondarily, it kind of deflates the "Apple thinks it invented everything" meme as well).
Seems like a good outcome. Don't think anyone can reasonably accuse Sony or Philips of being patent trolls, so there was a legitimacy here and a settlement is the best result for all.
Foundational--to modernifying internetistic securitation and trustiment computionism.