Apple Lawsuits

A federal jury in Texas has ordered Apple to pay around $308.5 million to a local licensing firm for infringing a patent related to digital rights management, reports Bloomberg. Following a five-day trial, jurors on Friday said Apple must pay running loyalty fees to Texas-based Personalized Media Communications (PMC). A running loyalty is generally based on the amount of sales of a product...

App developer Kosta Eleftheriou, who highlighted the problem of scam and copycat apps on the App Store last month, is now suing Apple for a variety of allegations, including negligence and anticompetitive conduct (via The Verge). Eleftheriou's complaint, filed against Apple in Santa Clara County, California, accuses the company of exploiting its control over iOS apps "to make billions of...

A judge in California has ruled that Google must face a class action lawsuit alleging that it secretly tracks the online activity of Chrome users even when they're using the browser in its privacy-oriented Incognito mode (via Bloomberg). The lawsuit was filed in June by three plaintiffs alleging that Google hoovers up user data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and other applications ...

Apple today filed a lawsuit against Simon Lancaster, a former employee who allegedly used his position within the company to steal "sensitive trade secret information" from Apple that was then leaked to a journalist and published in rumor articles. Lancaster worked at Apple for more than a decade, using his seniority to attend internal meetings and access documents that Apple says were...

Initially filed in 2016, a class action lawsuit that accuses Apple of violating the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act, Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act, and other U.S. laws by providing customers with refurbished replacement devices is set to proceed to trial August 16, according to a notice this week from law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. Apple's repair terms and conditions state that,...

Apple has subpoenaed Valve in its ongoing lawsuit with Epic Games, demanding it provides huge amounts of commercial data about Steam sales and operations dating back several years, court filings have revealed (via PC Gamer). The subpoena was initiated by Apple in November 2020 under the argument that information about Valve's digital distribution service, Steam, would be crucial to...

Facebook is preparing to launch a lawsuit against Apple for alleged anticompetitive behaviour, particularly regarding App Tracking Transparency and iMessage, according to The Information. The antitrust lawsuit would contend that Apple has abused its power in the smartphone industry by enforcing App Store rules that Apple itself supposedly does not have to follow. Within this, the case...

Italian consumer association Altroconsumo today announced that it has launched a class action lawsuit [PDF] against Apple for planned obsolescence (via Reuters). Altroconsumo is seeking damages of 60 million euros on behalf of Italian consumers who were "tricked" by the practice, with the lawsuit covering the iPhone 6, ‌iPhone‌ 6 Plus, ‌iPhone‌ 6s, and ‌iPhone‌ 6s Plus."When consumers buy...

Corellium, a mobile device company that supports iOS, this week won a significant victory in its legal battle against Apple. Apple last year sued Corellium for copyright infringement because the Corellium software is designed to replicate iOS to allow security researchers to locate bugs and security flaws. According to The Washington Post, a Florida judge threw out Apple's claims that...

Back in 2008, Jay Freeman first released Cydia as an app store designed for the iPhone, offering apps a few months before Apple had its own App Store. Since then, Cydia has served as an app repository for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, making it easy to install unauthorized software on compatible devices. Now Cydia is joining a growing cadre of developers accusing Apple of anticompetitive...

An EU consumer advocacy group has filed class-action lawsuits against Apple in both Belgium and Spain for "unfair and misleading commercial practices" related to the iPhone performance management system it introduced in iOS 10.2.1 without informing customers. Brought by Euroconsumers, which describes itself as the "world's leading consumer cluster organization," the suits allege that the...

An antitrust lawsuit leveled at Apple by Blix Inc. has been dismissed by a federal judge, in what appears to be a major setback for developers accusing Apple of malpractice with its App Store (via Bloomberg). BlueMail was removed from the Mac App Store in June 2019 after Apple found the app to be in violation of several ‌App Store‌ Review Guidelines, including "proposing to override basic...

A California federal judge on Tuesday dismissed some of Apple's counterclaims against Epic Games in its ongoing antitrust battle over Apple's App Store fees (via Bloomberg). Apple and Epic have been in a legal fight since August, when Apple removed Fortnite from the ‌App Store‌ after ‌Epic Games‌ introduced a direct payment option in the app, defying the ‌App Store‌ rules. ‌Epic Games‌...

Apple and Epic Games do not want to have a jury trial in their ongoing legal dispute over Fortnite and Apple's App Store policies, according to a filing submitted to the Northern California court handling the case today. The two companies said they have met and have agreed that both Epic's claims and Apple's counterclaims should be tried by the court with a bench trial at a date to be...

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said Apple must pay over 12,000 retail workers in California for the time spent waiting for compulsory bag searches at the end of their shifts (via Reuters). A unanimous three-judge panel reversed a judge who had tossed the case and ordered him to enter summary judgment for the plaintiffs, after the California Supreme Court in response to...

Another class-action complaint has been lodged against Apple, which claims that the company was aware of a MacBook Pro design flaw that caused some devices to have backlight display issues (via Apple Insider). The so-called "flexgate" problem was present in some ‌MacBook Pro‌ models manufactured between 2016 and 2017. The problem appears as dark patches along the bottom of the ‌MacBook Pro‌...

The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) today announced that it is launching an investigation to determine whether Apple's mobile devices and Macs violate patents owned by Japanese consumer electronics company Maxell. [PDF] Maxell filed a complaint with the USITC on July 17, alleging that Apple's mobile devices, tablets, smartwatches, and laptop computers violate patents...

Apple needs to pay PanOptis $506 million for willfully infringing on a handful of patents related to 4G LTE technology, a Texas federal jury ruled today (via Law360). The jury said that Apple did not prove that PanOptis' patent claims were invalid, resulting in the order to pay $506 million in royalties. PanOptis first levied a lawsuit against Apple in February 2019 on behalf of five of its...

U.S. federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers this week ruled that a class action lawsuit accusing Apple of fraudulently concealing weakening demand for iPhones between August 2017 and January 2019 can proceed in part, as reported by Reuters. In January 2019, Apple lowered its revenue guidance to $84 billion for the first quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, down from its original forecast of $89...

A proposed class action lawsuit in the U.S. has accused Google of violating federal wiretap laws by tracking the online activities of users when in Incognito mode. According to Reuters, the class action argues that by surreptitiously collecting information about what people view online and where they browse when they use Chrome's private browsing mode, Google has been intentionally deceiving...