Apple and Fortress strike patent litigation deal
Apple has withdrawn from an antitrust suit against hedge fund and alleged ‘patent troll’ Fortress Investment, while Fortress-backed entities have also dropped patent infringement suits against the tech company.
The dismissal of Apple’s claims with prejudice, alongside the patent assertion entities' (PAEs) withdrawal from their litigation campaign, indicates a deal between the two companies.
Apple’s withdrawal leaves Intel as the sole plaintiff in the antitrust suit against Fortress, which alleges the hedge fund operated an anti-competitive patent aggregation scheme. Intel originally filed the complaint on its own in October 2019, before Apple joined the following month.
Court filings shed no light on the details of any potential deal between the parties. The decision comes as Apple itself fends off a number of antitrust suits in which it faces arguments similar to those it raised against Fortress.
The antitrust suit accused Fortress of stockpiling patents to use in litigation against tech companies, with the IP mostly covering the components of consumer electronics.
“Fortress and its PAEs seek to use that ill-gotten power to extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anti-competitively from Intel, Apple, and other suppliers of electronic devices or components or software for such devices and ultimately from consumers of those products,” the suit claimed.
Apple itself faces accusations that it has abused its market power, including a high-profile suit brought by Epic Games over the App Store and Apple’s payment policies.
The tech company has raised its IP assets as a defence in that case, arguing that it should be allowed to realise a return on the IP covering the App Store.
“As the leading antitrust treatise recognises, there has been ‘no case in which a US court consciously held that an intellectual property right was itself an essential facility that must be licensed on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms,” Apple argued in court last month.
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