Apple must pay a shell company $532.9 million because iTunes infringes upon three patents related to online patents, a jury in East Texas ruled on Tuesday.
The company in question, named Smartflash LLC, is also based in Texas and doesn’t make or do anything besides file patent lawsuits, as an Apple spokesperson pointed out.
“Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no U.S. presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented,” said Apple’s Kristin Huguet to Bloomberg, which reported the verdict, shown here in a screenshot:
Court records show that Smartflash is also suing [company]Google[/company], Samsung and [company]Amazon[/company] with the same patents.
The patents themselves have a priority date of 1999, and describe a method for “downloading and paying for data such as audio and video data, text, software, games and other types of data.”
The broad-based nature of the patents, which appear to…
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Brian By Experience 