Will the $234 million Patent Suit Loss affect Apple?

A federal jury found Apple guilty of patent infringement and ordered the tech-giant to pay the University of Wisconsin-Madison $234 million in damages. Last year, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) claimed that Apple had illegally used in its products a performance improving processing technology that WARF had patented in 1998. According to the jury, the technology was present in Apple Products such as the iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, and several versions of the iPad.

This recent patent loss isn’t unusual for Apple as it fights patent cases fairly regularly and doesn’t always end up on the winning side. However, there is one unusual thing about this case. This is the first time that university students and a professor have filed a lawsuit against Apple. A computer science professor Gurindar Sohi and three graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Andreas Moshovos, Scott Breach, Terani Vijaykumar were the ones that took Apple to court for infringement.

WARF representatives in court claimed that in order to speed computer processing by allowing the efficient out-of-order execution of computer instructions with a data speculation circuit, Apple used a technology that WARF had patented a long time back. The jury during deliberations found that WARF had indeed received the technology patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1998.

Apple made several unsuccessful attempts to challenge the 1998 patent in the US Patent and Trademark Office after WARF filed its lawsuit in early 2014. Similarly, Apple unsuccessfully argued in court last week that the patent itself was invalid. This news has also reinvigorated the feelings of other professors who feel companies have taken the fruits of their patented research without compensation.

This isn’t the first time that the technology in question has been a matter of debate. WARF was involved in a legal battle over the use of the same microchip with Intel in 2008. However, Intel acted sharply and settled the matter out of court by paying WARF $110 million to license the technology in order to use the patented microchip legally.

Apple plans to appeal the court’s decision. However, they will have to either pay a licensing fee or else abandon the chip if they’re unsuccessful. The court ruled that Apple’s patent infringement was not willful. Therefore, it ordered the tech-giant to pay WARF $234 million whereas the amount WARF sought was $862 million.

On a separate note, the professor behind the patent, Professor Gurindar Sohi praised his team for the technology ‘that was way ahead of its time.’ He claimed that they tried to anticipate how computers would need to operate today almost two decades ago. He also revealed that the equivalent of more than 11 years of work went into solving this problem by his research team.

In spite of taking Apple to court and filing a lawsuit against them, managing director of WARF, Carl Gulbrandsen hopes to resolve this matter with Apple so that the two institutions can work together to build a strong and mutually benefiting relationship.