Apple Lawsuits

The United States International Trade Commission will not be blocking imports of the iPhone in the ongoing Apple v. Qualcomm case, reports Reuters. Qualcomm had asked the ITC to ban imports of the AT&T and T-Mobile iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X models that use chips from Intel, citing multiple patent violations. Qualcomm did not ask for a ban on iPhones...

Qualcomm has accused Apple of stealing confidential information and trade secrets, and passing them on to rival chipmaker Intel, according to a court document filed Monday and reported by several media outlets. For background, Qualcomm agreed that Apple could have access to its source code and tools for LTE modems, but with limitations. Qualcomm believes that Apple proceeded to share the...

Just over two years after the European Commission ruled that Apple was receiving illegal state aid from Ireland -- where it had reportedly paid less than 2 percent in taxes compared to the country's headline 12.5 percent corporate tax rate -- Apple has now paid back the entire 13.1 billion euros ($15.3 billion) it owed in back taxes (via Reuters). The European Commission confirmed the...

Arizona-based speech recognition technology company AVRS, short for Advanced Voice Recognition Systems, Inc., has filed a lawsuit against Apple this week, accusing the iPhone maker of infringing on one of its patents with its virtual assistant Siri, according to court documents obtained by MacRumors. The asserted patent is U.S. Patent No. 7,558,730, titled "Speech recognition and...

Class action lawsuits continue to mount against Apple over the iPhone Slowdown saga. For those unaware, late last year, Apple admitted that it throttles the maximum performance of some older iPhone models with chemically aged batteries when necessary in order to prevent the devices from unexpectedly shutting down. Apple views this as a feature intended to provide the best user experience...

Apple today filed petitions with the United States Patent and Trademark Office challenging the validity of four Qualcomm patents amid an increasingly vicious legal battle, reports Bloomberg. Apple is aiming to get the USPTO to cancel the four Qualcomm patents, arguing that they do not cover new ideas. The patents in question cover camera autofocusing, a device that functions as a phone and a...

Toshiyasu Abe, a resident of Vancouver, Washington, has filed a lawsuit against Apple in Oregon district court this week, accusing the company of infringing upon his patent with Key Flicks and 3D Touch on select iPhone and iPad models. The patent in question is No. 6,520,699, granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in February 2003.Mr. Abe has been an entrepreneur and...

In 2011, a class action lawsuit filed against Apple accused the company of operating an illegal monopoly by not allowing iPhone users to download mobile apps outside of its own App Store, reducing consumer choice. The antitrust case was eventually dismissed in 2013 by a U.S. district court in Northern California, due to errors in the complaint, leading to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...

Last month, a jury ruled that Samsung must pay Apple $539 million for violating Apple design patents as part of a legal battle that has spanned years, but the jury's ruling apparently won't be the end of the dispute between the two companies. Samsung last week filed an appeal (via CNET) asking the U.S. District Court in San Jose to either reduce the judgment against it to $28 million or hold a ...

A new class action lawsuit filed against Apple this week alleges that all Apple Watch models suffer from a defect that causes the display to "crack, shatter, or detach from the body of the watch, through no fault of the wearer." The proposed class is all current and former owners of all models, sizes, and variants of the Apple Watch, including the original, Series 1, Series 2, and Series 3...

The latest Samsung v. Apple trial wrapped up this afternoon after the jury decided that Samsung must pay Apple a total of $539 million for violating Apple's design patents with five android devices sold between 2010 and 2011, reports CNET. A total of $533,316,606 was awarded to Apple for Samsung's violation of three design patents, while the remaining $5,325,050 was for Samsung's infringement...

A second class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple over problematic keyboards in recent MacBook and MacBook Pro models. Like the first lawsuit last week, this complaint alleges that small amounts of dust or debris accumulating on 2015-and-later MacBook and 2016-and-later MacBook Pro keyboards can render the butterfly switch mechanism underneath individual keys non-functional,...

Apple and Samsung are back in court this week for a damages retrial that will determine just how much Samsung has to pay Apple for infringing on Apple design patents. Samsung was found guilty of violating the patents back in 2012, but the two companies have been fighting over the amount of money Samsung should pay as a result for the last six years. The core issue between the two companies is...

Apple has been hit with a class action lawsuit over "defective" keyboards in recent MacBook and MacBook Pro models. The lawsuit, filed in Northern California district court, alleges that the low-profile, butterfly-switch keyboards in 2015-and-later MacBook and 2016-and-later MacBook Pro models are "prone to fail," resulting in "non-responsive keys" and other issues, according to court...

Apple faces its first legal action over Meltdown and Spectre in the United States, even though the vulnerabilities were found to affect nearly all computers and other devices, according to court documents reviewed by MacRumors. Meltdown and Spectre are serious hardware-based vulnerabilities that take advantage of the speculative execution mechanism of a CPU, allowing hackers to gain access...

Apple now faces over two dozen lawsuits around the world that either accuse the company of intentionally slowing down older iPhones, or at least of failing to disclose power management changes it made starting in iOS 10.2.1. The lawsuits include 24 class action complaints in the United States, with the latest two filed on Thursday by Marc Honigman and Lauri Sullivan-Stefanou in New York and...

Apple yesterday confirmed that it has implemented power management features in older iPhones to improve performance and prevent unexpected shutdowns as the battery in the devices starts to degrade, and this admission has now led to a class action lawsuit, which was first noticed by TMZ. Los Angeles residents Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas, represented by Wilshire Law Firm, this morning...

When Apple released the updated App Store as part of iOS 11, the App Store logo got an overhaul. Instead of an "A" made from a pencil, a paintbrush, and a ruler, Apple designed a simpler "A" that looks like it's constructed from popsicle sticks. As it turns out, Apple's App Store logo bears a resemblance to the logo used by a Chinese clothing brand named KON, and now KON is suing Apple....

Qualcomm today announced that it has filed three new patent infringement claims against Apple, accusing the Cupertino company of violating a total of 16 Qualcomm patents with its most recent iPhones, including the iPhone X. Most of the patents in question cover technologies like carrier aggregation, memory designs, and power management features that are designed help to reduce battery usage,...

Google is facing a collective lawsuit in the United Kingdom over its alleged snooping of iPhone users, according to a new report in the Financial Times. According to the lawsuit, led by a former director of the consumer group Which?, Google illegally gathered the personal data of millions of iPhone users in the U.K. between 2011 and 2012. Veteran consumer rights campaigner Richard Lloyd...