Report: Apple wins appeal of UW-Madison patent infringement case
Apple has won an appeal of a patent infringement case originally brought by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to a report from the Reuters news service.
The report says a federal appellate court in Washington, D.C., has thrown out at least a portion of the $506 million in damages originally awarded to UW in the case. It wasn't immediately clear Friday how much was thrown out.
In July 2017, a federal judge in Madison ruled that Apple Inc. must pay $506 million for infringing on a patent owned by the UW's research foundation — double the amount a jury awarded in 2015 to include ongoing royalties for Apple products sold with the patented technology.
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The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sued Apple in 2014 saying the processors in some of its devices infringed on a patent obtained in 1998 by a UW computer science professor and three of his students.
A jury ruled in favor of WARF — the independent patenting and licensing foundation for UW research — in October 2015, tossing aside Apple's claim that the patent was invalid and finding that Apple infringed the patent when it rolled out its 2013 and 2014 iPhone and iPad lineups.
U.S. District Judge William Conley, who presided over the 2015 jury trial, said in his 2017 ruling that Apple continued to infringe on the UW patent after the jury's verdict, until the patent expired in December 2016. He added $272 million in supplemental damages to the jury's $234 million verdict.
Attempts to get comments from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Apple on Friday were unsuccessful.