Apple Lawsuits

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...

A lawsuit that accused Apple and M. Night Shyamalan of copying 2013 film "The Truth About Emanuel" for the "Servant" Apple TV+ series has been dismissed, reports Variety. A federal judge today threw out the copyright lawsuit, which had been levied against Apple and Shyamalan by director Francesca Gregorini, who claimed that "Servant" appropriated the plot of her movie and used the same...

Apple has been involved in a long-running iPhone trademark dispute in Brazil, which was revived today by IGB Electronica, a Brazilian consumer electronics company that originally registered the "‌iPhone‌" name in 2000. IGB Electronica fought a multi-year battle with Apple in an attempt to get exclusive rights to the "‌iPhone‌" trademark, but ultimately lost, and now the case has been brought ...

A nationwide class action lawsuit filed against Apple in Northern California court this week accuses the company of knowingly concealing a defect with a display-related flex cable on recent 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models. As discovered by repair website iFixit last year, some MacBook Pro models released in 2016 and 2017 have experienced issues with uneven backlighting caused by a...

Security researchers are scared to use, buy, or even talk about iPhone emulation software Corellium after Apple levied a lawsuit against the company, reports Motherboard. Apple in August 2019 filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Corellium, a mobile device virtualization company that works with iOS. In the lawsuit, Apple claimed that Corellium had illegally replicated the operating...

Apple has agreed to pay $18 million to settle a California class-action lawsuit that accused it of intentionally breaking FaceTime in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. According to the lawsuit, originally filed in 2017, Apple forced users to upgrade so it could avoid payments on a data deal with Akamai. Apple used two connection methods when it launched ‌‌FaceTime‌‌ in 2010: a...

A court in Florida has dismissed a consumer lawsuit alleging that Apple intentionally "broke" FaceTime on older iPhones as a cost-saving measure (via Bloomberg Law). In 2017, a similar class-action lawsuit was brought against Apple in California that claimed Apple broke ‌FaceTime‌ in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. According to the lawsuit, Apple forced users to upgrade so it could ...

Apple in January was ordered to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) $838 million for infringing on Caltech patents related to WiFi transmissions. Apple was hoping to get one of the patents in the case invalidated, but today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against Apple and declined to invalidate the patent in question, upholding a prior decision from ...

Apple has been in an ongoing legal fight with Gerard Williams III, who worked at Apple until February 2019 when he left to start up a new company called Nuvia with other Apple developers. Williams was Apple's lead chip designer, working on the A7 to A12X chips that Apple used in its mobile devices, and his new company develops processors for use in data centers. Apple first sued Williams in...

Apple broke California law when it failed to pay employees for time spent waiting for mandatory bag searches at the end of their shifts, the California Supreme Court ruled today. [PDF] The unanimous court decision, shared today by Bloomberg Law and The Los Angeles Times, dates back to a class action lawsuit filed against Apple in 2013. Employees at the time alleged that Apple subjected...

Last week, BlueMail co-founders Ben Volach and Dan Volach penned an open letter that encouraged any developers who feel that Apple kicked them out of the App Store or has treated them unfairly to share their stories. BlueMail itself 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, but the Volach brothers...

Back in October, the developers behind email app BlueMail sued Apple, alleging that the "Hide My Email" feature of "Sign in with Apple" infringes on its patented technology. The complaint also accuses Apple of anticompetitive behavior, including removing BlueMail from the Mac App Store. Last week, after months of making little to no progress with Apple towards having its Mac app reinstated,...

Back in October, the developers behind email app BlueMail sued Apple, alleging that the "Hide My Email" feature of "Sign in with Apple" infringes on its patented technology. The complaint [PDF] also accuses Apple of anticompetitive behavior, including removing BlueMail from the Mac App Store. "Hide My Email" hides a user's personal email address by substituting it with a unique, random email ...

A class action lawsuit accusing Apple of violating consumer laws and breaching its warranties over an alleged iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus audio chip defect has been allowed to proceed, but the case has been narrowed. U.S. district judge Jon Tigar on Thursday denied Apple's motion to dismiss the plaintiffs' claims for breach of implied warranty under California law, violations of the...

Apple and Broadcom have been ordered to pay the California Institute of Technology a fine of $1.1 billion for infringing on Caltech's patents related to WiFi transmissions, reports Bloomberg. Apple has been ordered to pay $838 million, while Broadcom has been ordered to pay $270 million, but Apple plans to file an appeal. Caltech in 2016 filed a lawsuit against Broadcom and Apple,...

A former Apple executive who worked on the chips that power iPhones and iPads has had a request to toss a breach-of-contract lawsuit brought by the company rejected by the court in a tentative ruling. Last August, Apple sued its former A-series chip lead, Gerard Williams III, for breach of employment contract. Williams was the lead designer of Apple's custom ‌iPhone‌ and ‌iPad‌ chips from ...