After a two-week trial, judges found Apple guilty of infringing three Qualcomm patents after publishing them on an iPhone. As a result, Apple will pay $31 million to the company that filed the suit.
The 2017 lawsuit seeking financial compensation, which was awarded in its entirety to Qualcomm.
According to them, one patent concerned the connectivity of phones quickly to the Internet after they were turned on, another concerned battery efficiency and graphics processing, and the third concerned the traffic management feature that allows applications to download data much faster. According to CNET, Apple argued that Arjuna Siva -engineer – made important contributions to the start-up technology while working for the company, so it should have been mentioned in the original patent. However, Siva – who currently works for Google – did not appear in the San Diego trial, so the jury rejected Apple’s argument.
After Apple was found guilty in the case, Apple must pay Qualcomm a total of $31 million in damages, or $1.41 for each iPhone infringed. The victory of the alleged absolute inventor of the patents strengthens Qualcomm’s reputation as an innovator for its mobile components and its credibility in assuming that its ideas have been transferred to devices the size of the iPhone.
This dispute between Apple and Qualcomm has extended to other countries outside the United States. In Germany, for example, Qualcomm won against Apple with a court order in December, which led to a nationwide ban on some older versions of iPhones.