Apple has been a participant in various legal proceedings and claims since it became a company. It has been involved in several lawsuits with Samsung (News - Alert) and earlier this month, a federal jury found Apple guilty of willfully infringing on four VirnetX patents. The judge awarded them $625.6 million in damages and ongoing royalties from a previous court finding over Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and other communication protocols, used in services, such as iMessage, FaceTime (News - Alert) and VPN on Demand.
In January, Dot 23 Technologies, a non-practicing entity located in Texas, began proceedings to take Apple to trial for implementing Siri into the iPhone (News - Alert) platform, alleging the virtual assistant's voice dialing and geolocation capabilities infringe upon three patents. The latest patent infringement lawsuit comes from VoIP-Pal.com Inc.
Back in 2010, Apple (News - Alert) updated the iPhone software development kit allowing Internet telephony apps to work on the 3G network. The little-noticed move effectively unlocked the ability for the iPhone to be used as Web phones in the U.K. Apparently, it did not go completely unnoticed as VoIP-Pal’s patent troll alleges that Apple’s technology in both Wi-Fi calling and iMessage apps violate its intellectual properties. It contends that Apple was aware of the patent, filed in May 2008, but willingly continued to use the patented technology without a license.
According to VoIP-Pal’s calculations, Apple has profited from this infringement to the tune of almost $3 billion. As of yet, no judge has been assigned to this case, however, if Apple should lose, it might be required to have to pay as much as $9 billion in damages.
VoIP-Pal owns and develops a portfolio of Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) patent applications. The company acquired Digifonica International in 2013 to help develop its patent suite and it is believed that two of the patents developed for Digifonica have been infringed by Apple.
The two patents that are being questioned involve Apple’s iMessage app. These apps utilize a caller dialing profile which essentially recognizes if the user on the receiving end of a message is an Apple user or not. It then determines which route the message will use; it can either go through Apple’s iMessage or through traditional SMS/MMS. The lawsuit claims that the unauthorized distribution of such Apple products has weakened VoIP-Pal’s own sales efforts.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson