Again we talk about the use of patents by the Cupertino-based company without having previously checked out. This time it was the Network-1 Technologies company, a subsidiary of Mirror World Technologies, a company that registered the patent in 1999. This patent with number 6.006.227 shows a chronological information storage system, similar to that used by Apple in Time Machine.
Apparently it is not the first time that Apple looks in court for the use of this patent. Yale University professor David Gelernter and his student Eric Freeman created this chronological way of storing information in 1996. They later set up the company Mirror Worlds LLC and that's when they sued Apple.
In a first trial, the Cupertino-based company was forced to pay 625 million dollars for that reason of this patent, but a year later in the appeal process, the judge ruled in favor of Apple and the previous sentence was annulled, so that the company had to pay absolutely nothing.
But following the purchase of Mirror Worlds LLC by Network-1 Technologies, the company went to court again at the company but this time with more luck, since finally in this second trial, Apple has been sentenced to pay 25 million of pain, an amount much lower than the one that was sentenced in a first trial that they finally appealed.
Redmond-based company Microsoft also saw it sued for using the same patent, but this time she was only convicted of $ 4,6 million, a figure well below the 25 million dollars that Apple has had to pay for the use of the same patents without having previously checked out.