William Gallagher
The two technology firms Apple and Intel have jointly filed a suit against Fortress Investment Group, alleging that the organization's stockpiling of patents to use in legal cases violates antitrust laws.
Apple and Intel have together filed a lawsuit against Fortress Investment Group, an organization owned by Softbank, claiming that its repeated patent litigation violates US antitrust laws.
"Apple has suffered economic harm in the form of litigation costs and diversion of resources away from innovation to respond to these entities' serial nuisance suits," Apple said in the complaint seen by Reuters.
Reportedly, Apple is claiming that Fortress and related firms such as Uniloc USA and Uniloc Luxembourg, have filed at least 25 lawsuits.
"[Uniloc USA and Uniloc Luxembourg] have have disclosed that they believe they are entitled to damages of between $1.41 and $2.75 per Apple product, for total damages in the range of $375 to $732 million," said Apple.
"The apparent precision of the per-unit damages request is a facade," Apple continues. "Uniloc USA and Uniloc Luxembourg simply adopted the amounts that Apple sought from Samsung in litigation for Apple's patents."
Neither Intel nor Fortress have commented. However, Intel had previously filed a similar suit against Fortress in October, which it withdrew in order to join Apple in this new case.
Fortress did respond to that prior Intel suit, however.
"[We are] confident in our business practices and our legal position and view this lawsuit as meritless," a Fortress spokesperson told Reuters.
Fortress's Uniloc company most recently filed suit against Apple in September for alleged patent violation over a system for upgrading software on devices.
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19 Comments
Finally! Taking action on these Patent-Hounds is the right thing to do.
No matter what the system is, from taxes to patents to college admissions to product warranty claims to insurance claims to ... whatever, smart and/or devious people always find a way to game the system to their advantage. It’s a survival trait that’s deeply baked into the human condition. Whether it’s good or bad depends on which side of the exploitation equation you find yourself living on. Sometimes you’re the mole and sometimes your the mole whacker.
Excellent move.
This must stop otherwise companies can not continue innovating, developing good products for rest of humanity. It is not black and white but the patent laws should be if either you or company is innovator so entitled to protect your intellectual property. But, if you are a investor or a group who buy and sell patents than they are considered product/item(not IP) owner so can not sue others for infringement. What about cross licensing and a company wants to buy patent/s from someone or a company. It is complicated but somehow such patent brokers must be stopped suing genuine product developing companies.
They birdied the lead. This group is owned by SoftBank. SoftBank is the company that pledged to invest 10 billion in US tech development. They have their hands buried in tech and this screams ANTITRUST VIOLATION. Let’s buy up all the patents we can to sue as many tech firms as possible, to get money from each item they produce. I have a feeling SoftBank knows exactly what is going on. This needs investigated thoroughly.