In March, a court in the eastern district of Texas ordered Apple to pay just over $ 300 million to Personalized Media Communications (PMC) following a lawsuit over alleged DRM violations. However, the appeal to that sentence has been successful and Apple has obtained a sentence that annuls the verdict of March, since the judge has declared this company guilty of patent troll, a figure that American justice has begun to be taken very seriously by the pressure of technology, the companies that suffer the most from these types of lawsuits.
According to Bloomberg, the patent on which the $ 308 million March judgment was based is now "unenforceable" after Apple appealed the earlier judgment, so Personalized Media Communications not only won't get a dollar out of it. Apple, but also, You will also not be able to sue other technology companies for the same.
Personalized Media Communications LLC's patent for digital rights management is unenforceable because the company intentionally delayed your application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office so he could get more money later, Texas District Judge Rodney Gilstrap ruled.
PMC's patent application dates back to the 1980s, but none were granted until 2010 and beyond. This strategy was deemed to constitute "an unreasonable delay and abuse of the patent legal system," said Judge Rodney Gilstrap in the ruling. The method of delaying the granting of a patent to make it more profitable when technology has adopted it in a massive way is called underwater patent.
Gilstrap relied on a June ruling from the country's top patent court that facilitated the challenge of the so-called submarine patents. The court had access to internal documents of the PMC company in which Apple was named as one of the "natural candidates" to be addressed, back in 1991. In the same document, In addition to Apple, there were also Intel, IBM and Microsoft.
The company followed a strategy to make sure this and other patents were not issued until "the offense became general in an industry", according to internal documents cited by the judge.