Apple Lawsuits

Apple has filed a lawsuit against Mobile Star LLC, accusing the firm of infringing upon its registered trademarks and copyrights by selling counterfeit 5W USB Power Adapters and Lightning to USB cables on Amazon and Groupon, according to court documents published electronically this week. Apple said the counterfeit power products pose a significant danger to consumer safety because, among...

A class action lawsuit filed by four former Apple retail employees over alleged California Labor Code violations commences tomorrow in San Diego Superior Court. A civil jury trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. local time in a courtroom presided over by the Honorable Eddie C. Sturgeon, nearly two years after Apple's appeal and motion for dismissal was denied in the case. The...

Three additional law firms have joined a class action lawsuit against Apple over an alleged defect that causes iPhone 6 Plus touchscreens to become unresponsive and fail. Back in August, reports began appearing from iPhone 6 owners describing an apparently latent manufacturing issue that causes a flickering bar to appear at the top of the screen and the display to become unresponsive or less...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reinstated Apple's $119.6 million award in a longstanding patent lawsuit with Samsung, after eight of twelve judges ruled it was wrong to throw out the verdict in February.The bulk of the award, $98.7 million, was for the detection patent that the earlier panel said wasn’t infringed. The February decision also said the other two patents were ...

A federal jury in Tyler, Texas has ordered Apple to pay $22.1 million to patent firm Acacia Research for violating U.S. Patent No. 8,055,820, related to cellular network technologies, according to court documents filed electronically this week. The monetary award is a running royalty for Apple's infringement through March 2016. The jury said Apple did not prove with clear and convincing...

Thomas Davidson of Pennsylvania, Todd Cleary of California, and Jun Bai of Delaware have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple over an alleged defect that causes iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus touchscreens to become unresponsive and fail, according to court documents filed electronically this week. The class action complaint, filed with the U.S. District Court for Northern California, accuses ...

Canadian songwriter and producer Alex Greggs, who has worked with several renowned artists such as Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, and the late Michael Jackson, is suing Apple in a larger lawsuit filed against singer Ariana Grande, electronic artist David Guetta, publisher Universal Music Group, and others, according to court documents filed electronically this week. Greggs claims...

511 Innovations, Inc. is the latest patent troll to file a complaint against Apple with the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, claiming that the iPhone's proximity sensor infringes upon five of its patents. The asserted patents¹, filed between 1999 and 2012, relate to various methods for measuring optical characteristics of an object, such as color spectrums, translucence, gloss, and...

Calvin Klein, Dieter Rams, Norman Foster, and over 100 of the world's leading design professionals have filed a lengthy amicus brief [PDF] in support of Apple in an over five year old patent lawsuit against rival Samsung. Apple was awarded nearly $1 billion in damages in 2012 after Samsung was found to have copied the "look and feel" of the iPhone, but a significant part of the decision was rev...

Apple and Broadcom have jointly filed counterclaims against the California Institute of Technology in an ongoing Wi-Fi-related lawsuit, denying any alleged infringement of the technologies and urging the court to invalidate the asserted patents, according to court documents filed electronically this week. Apple argued that Caltech did not file the lawsuit until May 26, 2016, more than six...

Apple has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against Samsung's request to send a longstanding patent lawsuit between the two companies back to lower court for further proceedings, reports Reuters. Apple told the court that its South Korean rival has "no evidence" that design patent damages should be based on anything less than the value of an entire smartphone, according to court documents...

A judge in Amsterdam has ruled in favor of a Dutch woman [Google Translate] who sued Apple for refusing to replace her broken iPhone 6 Plus with a new model, and instead offering her a refurbished model as per its standard policy. The court nullified the purchase agreement and ordered Apple to refund the woman the full €799 that she paid for the iPhone, which was purchased in December 2014...

Somaltus, LLC has filed a complaint against Apple today in an Eastern Texas district court, accusing the iPhone maker of infringing upon its 2010 patent related to complex battery technologies. The small Frisco, Texas-based firm also filed lawsuits against Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba over the same patent. The lawsuit claims that the iPhone 6s and any similar devices sold by...

Apple will pay $25 million to settle a patent lawsuit with Network-1 Technologies' subsidiary Mirror World Technologies and license its patents, the companies announced today. The patent (No. 6,006,227) dates back to 1999, covering a system that stores documents in a stream ordered chronologically, similar to Apple's Cover Flow or Time Machine. Under the terms of the agreement, Apple will...

Pennsylvania resident Samuel Lit has hit Apple with a lawsuit claiming that the company infringed on his patent for web carousels, according to documents filed in the Northern Illinois District Court (via AppleInsider). Apple's website typically features a homepage with a carousel containing four to five windows displaying its products. Lit owns U.S. Patent No. 8,793,330, which is a "system...

Florida resident Thomas S. Ross has filed a lawsuit against Apple this week, claiming that the iPhone, iPad, and iPod infringe upon his 1992 invention of a hand-drawn "Electronic Reading Device" (ERD). The court filing claims the plaintiff was "first to file a device so designed and aggregated," nearly 15 years before the first iPhone. Between May 23, 1992 and September 10, 1992, Ross...

The United States Department of Justice today urged the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that was in Apple's favor and send the Apple vs. Samsung case back to trial court, reports Reuters. The DoJ submitted an amicus brief on Samsung's behalf as the Supreme Court prepares to hear the long-running Apple vs. Samsung case. Apple's dispute with Samsung made its way to the Supreme...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on May 26 invalidated two of three patents owned by Smartflash LLC, a patent licensing firm that was awarded a $532.9 million verdict against Apple in February 2015, according to Bloomberg.A three-judge panel at the patent agency found that the two patents never should have been issued in the first place because the idea of storing and paying for data is an...

Apple and Broadcom have been jointly named as defendants in a legal complaint filed by the California Institute of Technology last week over alleged infringement of its various patented Wi-Fi-related technologies. Caltech's patents, granted between 2006 and 2012, are highly technical and relate to IRA/LDPC codes that utilize simpler encoding and decoding circuitry for improved data...

In February, Seattle-based law firm Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala (PCVA) brought a class action lawsuit against Apple over the "Error 53" bug, which bricked iPhone 6 models with select third-party components. Apple quickly responded, confirming the error and issuing an updated version of iOS 9.2.1 to fix the error. Earlier this month, Apple moved to dismiss an amended version of the class action...