UW-Madison will no longer receive $506 million in damages from Apple Inc, after the tech giant won a federal appeal against the university over patent rights for a computer processor Friday, according to a report by Reuters.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation first sued Apple in 2014, on the basis that the company had infringed on a patent for technology it had used in iPhone 5s, 6s and 6 Pluses. The technology allowed those phones to predict user instructions and was developed in the 1990s by UW-Madison professor of computer science Gurindar Sohi and three of his students.
In 2015, a jury ordered that Apple pay a $234 million settlement to WARF, and additional damages totaling $272 were added in a subsequent hearing after it was revealed that Apple had continued to violate the patent.
When the initial ruling was overturned Friday, WARF lost the entire $506 million settlement.
“We hold that no reasonable juror could have found literal infringement in this case,” Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote for the Washington, D.C.-based appeals court.
WARF officially secured a patent on that innovation in 1998, and settled a lawsuit against Intel Corp. for similar violations in 2008.
