Hometown San Diego jury awards Qualcomm $31.6 million in Apple case

“Mobile phone chip supplier Qualcomm Inc on Friday won a legal victory against iPhone maker Apple Inc, with a jury in federal court in San Diego finding that Apple owes Qualcomm about $31 million for infringing three of its patents,” Stephen Nellis and Jan Wolfe report for Reuters.
“Qualcomm last year sued Apple alleging it had violated patents related to helping mobile phones get better battery life,” Nellis and Wolfe report. “During an eight-day jury trial, Qualcomm asked the jury to award it unpaid patent royalties of up to $1.41 per iPhone that violated the patents.”
Nellis and Wolfe report, “The companies’ legal battle will reach a crescendo in April, when an antitrust case filed by Apple in early 2017 heads to trial and challenges the foundation of Qualcomm’s business model of licensing its patents to mobile device makers and selling them chips.”
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“‘You win some, you lose some,'” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “The same week that Apple won a multi-billion-dollar decision against Qualcomm (incorrectly portrayed by various media as a $1 billion matter), Qualcomm won a $31 million consolation prize (so we’re talking about roughly 1% of what was at stake in the other context), with a San Diego jury having deemed Apple to infringe all three Qualcomm patents still in play (one had been thrown out by the court and two had been withdrawn by Qualcomm) and agreeing 100% with Qualcomm’s damages claim.”
“This means it worked out for Qualcomm to make its case to a jury of laypersons — a case that had underwhelmed a professional judge (in fact, one of the most experienced patent judges in America, Administrative Law Judge Thomas Be. Pender),” Mueller writes. “The discrepancies between the ITC’s findings (which are final except for only one patent that Apple has already worked around anyway) and the verdict rendered by Qualcomm’s hometown jury without a great deal of deliberation time could hardly be more extreme.”
“For the wider dispute between Apple and Qualcomm, it’s a sideshow in economic terms and far from a final outcome,” Mueller writes. “The perspective of a judge, or a panel of appellate judges, on the evidence presented and whether a reasonable jury could possibly reach this result is often very different from what laypeople serving on a jury think.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A minor battle “win*” nestled inside Qualcomm’s eventual lost war.
*If you consider it a “win” that Qualcomm’s slimeball ambulance chasers convinced a handful of non-deliberative noobs who weren’t even smart enough to get out of jury duty to have Apple dig under their couch cushions for a pittance.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. judge rules Qualcomm owes Apple nearly $1 billion in patent royalty rebates – March 15, 2019
Apple counsel maintains claims of witness tampering in Qualcomm patent case – March 14, 2019
Former Apple engineer says Qualcomm tech was his idea but doesn’t claim inventor status – March 11, 2019
Apple loses star witness Arjuna Siva in Qualcomm trial – March 7, 2019
Apple says Qualcomm stole idea for smartphone boot-up tech from engineer – March 5, 2019
The Qualcomm v. Apple patent jury won’t get these simple, brutally honest instructions – March 5, 2019