Testimony on stolen patent deals huge blow to Qualcomm’s San Diego infringement case against Apple

“The ongoing Qualcomm v. Apple patent infringement trial in San Diego (Southern District of California) is generally the least interesting part of the earth-spanning dispute between these two companies,” Florian Mueller writes for Foss Patents. “It’s basically an attempt to get a better outcome in a jury trial than Qualcomm achieved in the ITC, where the most experienced Administrative Law Judge and his six bosses appeared to be underwhelmed by a complaint over the same patents-in-suit as in the San Diego case.”
“But there is one aspect of that San Diego case that’s definitely interesting. It’s a perfect example of how truth is sometimes stranger than fiction,” Mueller writes. “If we come from the reasonably safe assumption that Arjuna Sivasithambaresan — who simply abbreviates his last name as ‘Siva’ — testified truthfully under oath in two different fora (ITC and Southern District of California), Qualcomm’s ‘949 patent was filed on an invention a then-Apple employee (now with Google) actually made.”
“In other words, the most reasonable inference from that testimony is that Qualcomm decided to sue Apple over a patent Qualcomm applied for because it learned about the idea from a then-Apple employee,” Mueller writes. “Actually, the situation is even more bizarre: Even though Qualcomm already became aware of this problem in the aforementioned ITC case over the same patents, and decided to drop the ‘949 patent from the ITC case shortly thereafter (most likely for this very reason), Qualcomm nevertheless decided to give it another try in San Diego. “Unbelievable” is not strong enough a word to describe this. Not even remotely. It’s not just that Qualcomm is hardly going to prevail on the ‘949 patent: a story of a stolen patent undermines a plaintiff’s credibility to an extent that’s the next best thing to self-sabotaging the entire case.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sleep tight, Qualcomm extortionists. Sleep tight.
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