Appeals court tosses $1.1B award as ‘legally unsupportable’
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit threw out a jury verdict which ordered Apple and Broadcom to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) $1.1 billion in damages for infringing its Wi-Fi technology patents. The court upheld the infringement ruling but ordered a new trial for damages. It also vacated an infringement verdict regarding Caltech’s patent ‘781 and ordered a retrial
The ruling said the formula used to determine Apple and Broadcom’s share of damages was faulty and “legally unsupportable,” and ordered a new trial to determine damages.
Caltech first sued Apple and Broadcom in 2016. The suit claimed iPhones and other Apple-made devices built from 2010 to 2017 using Broadcom chips infringed on Caltech’s patents. Both companies denied the allegations, and Apple tried and failed to have Caltech’s patents over Wi-Fi error correction techniques invalidated. The jury ordered Apple to pay Caltech $837.8 million, and it ordered Broadcom to pay $270.2 million.
In September, the federal appeals court judges hearing the case began to poke holes in the judgment. U.S. Circuit Judge Timothy Dyk questioned whether Apple and Broadcom had violated any Caltech patents at all. Circuit Judge Alan Lourie expressed concern at the time about the royalty rates used to determine each party’s liability. Judge Richard Linn agreed – the ruling vacates the award and orders a new trial to determine damages.
“Neither of Caltech’s experts offered any factual basis to conclude that Broadcom and Apple would have been willing to engage in separate negotiations leading to vastly different royalty rates for the same chips,” said the court.
Apple and Broadcom’s Wi-Fi patent violation didn’t support “treating the same chips differently at different stages in the supply chain.” As a result, the two-tier damages theory expressed by the patent were “legally unsupportable on this record.”
Caltech is separately suing other tech giants for violating the same patents including Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, and HP. Those cases are pending.
Broadcom announced in December that it would acquire enterprise SaaS network performance monitoring firm AppNeta. The acquisition is meant to bolster Broadcom’s network monitoring solutions for Internet and hybrid cloud applications.
“Hybrid cloud deployments, work from home, and prevalence of SaaS-based applications have made enterprises incredibly reliant on the Internet to deliver business-critical applications to employees and customers,” said Serge Lucio, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom.
