A Delaware jury has ruled that the iPhone infringes on multiple patents belonging to MobileMedia, a patent holding company that owns roughly 300 technology-related patents as part of their portfolio. They first filed suit against Apple more than two years ago citing 14 different patent violations including ones related to rejecting calls, screen rotation and transmitting GPS coordinates with regards to directions in a map app.
After all of the evidence was combed over, jurors found that Apple infringed on three MobileMedia patents. Lawyers for Apple tried to get the case thrown out but ultimately proved unsuccessful.
MobileMedia CEO Larry Horn said his company was very pleased with the jury’s decision and felt the ruling was justified. It’s unclear yet how much Apple will have to pay for the violations but that information will likely be decided at a later date.
As The Verge highlights, the three patents in question date back to the 1990s. The first, US 6,070,068, covers displaying call options on a screen and controlling call options for multiple calls. The next patent, US 6,253,075, covers a method of determining if an incoming call should be rejected and how to go about breaking off the communication. This also covers notifying the recipient of an incoming call and giving them the option to reject it.
The final patent, US 6,427,078, deals with a mobile phone with a camera, display, processor, user inputs and optics for obtaining image information (a camera?) as well as the ability to transmit images to another location using RF.
As you can see, all of the patents are extremely vague but unfortunately, that’s the nature of patents these days. Apple declined to comment on the story as of writing.
