Apple, Broadcom win new damages trial in $1.1B Caltech patent case

A U.S. appeals court has granted Apple and supply chain partner Broadcom a win by tossing out a jury verdict requiring the two companies to pay $1.1 billion for patent infringement.

The California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, sued Apple and Broadcom in 2016 for infringing on several pieces of intellectual property related to Wi-Fi technology. In January 2020, a jury found Apple and Broadcom guilty.

Apple and its supplier then sought to overturn the results of that trial, suggesting that it had been conducted with "multiple legal errors." On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with Apple and Broadcom, stating that the $1.1 billion in damages was not justified by the evidence, Reuters reported.

The court has ordered a new damages trial that will reconsider the awarded sum, but not the patent infringement.

In its original lawsuit, Caltech claimed that Apple's iPhone, iPad, and other products infringed on Wi-Fi patents held by the university. Those patents focused on Wi-Fi codes that are meant to simplify encoding and decoding for better performance and data transmission.

Broadcom, a supplier of Apple Wi-Fi chips at the time, was also named in the patent.

Back in 2020, a jury found Apple and Broadcom guilty of patent infringement. As a result, Apple was ordered to pay $838 million and Broadcom was ordered to pay $270 million. An Apple attempt in invalidate some of the patent claims did not pan out.

Caltech, which is based in Pasadena, California, has also sued a number of other technology giants, including Microsoft, Samsung, and Dell.

8 Comments

tokyojimu 531 comments · 17 Years

About 2 years ago

What happened to universities doing research for the public good, not for profit?

GerfnitAuthor 16 comments · 4 Years

Everyone wants to score $ for intellectual property, including universities. My former employer went after companies that violated our patents, but usually ended up with cross-licensing agreements, not money.

sbdude 290 comments · 5 Years

tokyojimu said:

What happened to universities doing research for the public good, not for profit?

CalTech is a private institution, so its goals are less philanthropic compared to a public(ly funded) institution. Of course, one need only google Moore v. The Regents of the University of California to see how much money a public university can make. That said, all universities in one form or another are a business pure and simple; their educational aims these days are questionable at best.

joekewe 29 comments · 17 Years

sbdude said:

That said, all universities in one form or another are a business pure and simple; their educational aims these days are questionable at best.

I agree with your comment when applied to FOR-profit universities, but NON-profit universities are not designed to be businesses. Yes, they charge tuition and have huge budgets, but they are not intended to generate profits. Most are focused on their "educational aims" while generating enough income to stay afloat.

jumpingcoco 104 comments · 7 Years

I'm a bit torn on this issue. >70% of the students, including me back in the day, received various types of intramural scholarships from Caltech, that covered about 80% of my cost. Caltech doesn't have a huge endowment like other big private schools such as Harvard, MIT, or Stanford. And fundamental research is REALLY, REALLY expensive, students' tuition can barely cover the operations cost, and you have to compete with other schools, both domestic and international. So industrial income + donation play an important role in maintaining its competitiveness in cutting-edge research. Caltech is more of a research institute than a university with with close to 3000 graduates and postdocs and only 900 undergrads, and there was even a discussion decade ago to cut the undergraduate program. So I think people should see it as a non-profit, research-focusing organization rather than "philanthropic college". Hopefully they can appeal and win something back from this case.