Apple, Qualcomm hurl flurry of lawsuits against each other
01 Dec 2017
The dispute between Apple and Qualcomm has deepened, with Qualcomm firing off three new lawsuits claiming infringement of its patents.
Qualcomm Inc provided the three filings to The Register and said they pertain to ''a total of 16 additional patents that Apple is currently using in its iPhones.''
''Five of these patents are also included in a new complaint filed in the International Trade Commission. Like the patents we asserted at the ITC in July, all of the 16 patents are non-standards essential patents implemented outside of the modem. Apple continues to use each of these patents in its devices without paying for them,'' the company said.
Qualcomm's various claims covered iPhones 5 through X, and also the Apple Watch. Qualcomm in July accused Apple of infringing several patents related to helping mobile phones get better battery life.
Meanwhile Apple Inc on Wednesday filed a countersuit against Qualcomm, alleging that Qualcomm's Snapdragon mobile phone chips that power a wide variety of Android-based devices infringe on Apple's patents.
Apple has denied the claims that it violated Qualcomm's battery life patents and alleged that Qualcomm's patents were invalid, a common move in such cases.
But on Wednesday, in a filing in US District Court in San Diego, Apple revised its answer to Qualcomm's complaint with accusations of its own. Apple alleges it owns at least eight battery life patents that Qualcomm has violated, Reuters reports.
The Apple patents involve ensuring each part of a phone's processor draws only the minimum power needed, turning off parts of the processor when they are not needed and making sleep and wake functions work better.
In its filing, Apple alleges that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 and 820 processors, which power phones from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Alphabet Inc's Google's Pixel phones, infringe on those patents. Samsung and Google are not named in Apple's counterclaims.
''Apple began seeking those patents years before Qualcomm began seeking the patents it asserts against Apple in this case,'' Apple alleged in its complaint.
Apple said it is seeking unspecified damages from San Diego-based Qualcomm.
On the Qualcomm side, some of its claims pertained to specific technologies it developed, like Quick Charge, the way CPUs handle memory, or the way radios behave on carrier networks.
Others, such as US 8683362 B2, ''Card metaphor for activities in a computing device'', were acquired by Qualcomm. The card metaphor patent was invented by Palm Inc for WebOS. Qualcomm alleges that Apple's infringed it since iOS 7 debuted in 2013.
Qualcomm's claims all quote Apple executives' ire at finding Samsung copying Apple designs. Steve Jobs' 1994 utterance ''Picasso had a saying, 'good artists copy, great artists steal.' And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas'' also gets an airing.
Qualcomm's tried to establish that Apple is a serial patent avoider that nonetheless knows the value of intellectual property and should therefore cough up.
The three 'sueballs' seek to have the US District Court rule that Apple has infringed the patents, get it to pay royalties, requested a permanent injunction on infringement of the patents and legal costs.
According to The Register, it's more likely that Apple will get its own lawyers busy, because International Trade Commission cases can lead to import bans. As the Arista vs Cisco case demonstrated, it is possible to rework products to remove contentious IP, but it's not a quick or cheap process. Even though Apple is extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, it could conceivably find itself with iPhones galore stuck on the docks and unable to enter the United States.
Hence the high likelihood of yet another counter-suit, a tactic Apple's already deployed this week after Qualcomm alleged it had misused eight power patents.
