Apple Sued Over Alleged Face ID Patent Infringement

it's moronic that generic ideas are patentable.

We're all lucky the idea of language wasn't patented or we'd all be paying royalties just for speaking, no matter the language.

I wonder how TrinamiX picked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas as their venue for their patent lawsuit? I guess because Texas is between Germany and Cupertino? No other possible reason I’m sure.

I don’t know the merits of this case. However, trinamiX is not a patent troll in a strict sense. The company produces real products and doesn’t just make money by suing for patent infringement.

However, it looks like the various cited patents weren’t applied for until at least 2024 so I’m not sure how trinamiX thinks it will win. I’ll have to dig around some more to see timelines.

Edit: The original patents were filed in 2019. There were also 2021 and later ones that added to and updated earlier patents. This means that while at first glace the patents look 'too late', that's not the full story.

Here's the timeline

2017: Apple introduces Face ID (worked on it well before then, of course*)
2019: trinamiX files first material-detection family
2021: trinamiX files skin-detection family
2023: Apple allegedly adds the relevant material/skin-detection functionality
2025–26: U.S. continuation patents issue (trinamiX filing with updates to their 2019 and 2021 filings)
2026: trinamiX sues.

Importantly, trinamiX, unlike some other companies, is not claiming they ever showed their technology to Apple and that Apple 'stole' or copied it. This is an independent-development patent infringement case. It's more along the lines of "you should have checked patents before doing something".

What further complicates this is that Apple certainly has prior art with FaceID in the iPhone X and continued development along the way. The fight might come down to whether trinamiX's particular ways to identify skin was inventive enough in 2019/2021 and that Apple wasn't already headed that way with their development that Apple's work counts as not infringing.

One question about the strength of trinamiX's case is that the company filed in a historically patent-owner-friendly district. The really notorious one is Eastern Texas, but the Western District of Texas is up there. However, the Western District's strongest plaintiff-friendly judge was Judge Albright in Waco, who recently left the federal bench. It's not clear how this will play out.

2nd Edit: For FaceID-related work, Apple filed for US 8,600,120 ('https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bf/86/27/71ad39346a8ccf/US8600120.pdf') in Jan. 2008. PrimeSense (Apple bought in 2013) had some related patents too, at least as early as 2005. Another company called Polar Rose had a 2004 patent ('https://patents.google.com/patent/US9087232B2/en') that was in the 3D-object-recognition family. Apple acquired Polar Rose.

Also important to trinamiX's claims and patents is Philips US/Koninklijke Philips NV had a late 2014 patent filing ('https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160155006A1/en') that covers the idea of projecting a predetermined illumination pattern onto a scene, imaging the returned pattern, analyzing how it was reproduced, and using that analysis to distinguish skin from non-skin. trinamiX's patents appear to be very similar to this Philips one. That's especially true in the context of a 2019 patent ('https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200218887A1/en') by Shenzhen Goodix Technology Co Ltd that predates trinamiX's filings and heavily overlaps with trinamiX's patent.

One last patent. Apple submitted a patent with a September 2018 priority date ('https://patents.google.com/patent/US10990805B2/en'). It deals with flood illumination, structured/pattern illumination, IR imaging, and depth-map facial authentication. interestingly, trinamiX's later 2021 patent family itself cites this Apple patent/application as prior art.

The more I've researched, the less sure I am that trinamiX will be successful with its suit. Apple might decide to pay the company some money to have them go away, but Apple has a strong obviousness case.

[If any from Apple's legal team are reading this -- hopefully you've found or have the same info (and more!)].

Worth pointing out before everyone piles on Apple: all seven patents were granted in 2025/2026. The iPhone 15 shipped in September 2023. So for a good chunk of the "accused products" list, Apple was selling those phones before trinamiX held a single one of these patents. At most this is a damages fight over post-grant sales, not the decade-long theft the complaint implies.
The bigger issue is that this is anti-spoofing for a system Apple built from scratch. Apple shipped Face ID with attention detection and mask rejection in 2017. trinamiX's own filing concedes the original Face ID didn't use their technology, which is a strange admission if you're claiming to have invented the concept of telling skin from a mask. The claims will live or die on whether there's prior art before their 2019 priority date, and there was a lot of liveness-detection research floating around by then.
Filing in Midland, Texas, in the Western District, is what companies do when they want a quick trial in front of a plaintiff-friendly patent docket, not what companies do when they're confident in the merits. If BASF thought Apple copied them, why wait until a full patent portfolio matured and three iPhone generations were on the market before saying a word?
Apple has real IP problems sometimes, but this doesn't look like one of them.

This can't be accurate.
Apple would never infringe upon a patent.
They are the good guys!

The sad thing is it’s probs cheaper to infringe than to pay royalties long term.

But what bothers me about this is why wait to raise the lawsuit after allegedly three generations of devices and soon to be four being launched with this infringement?

So it took them 9 years to figure this out - since the iPhone X?

No. That’s covered near the top of MacRumor’s article: “The complaint says Apple's original version of Face ID, introduced with the iPhone X in 2017, did not use trinamiX's technology, but that newer iPhones and iPads do.”

iPhone 15 and newer.