Apple, Broadcom get $1.1bn damages retrial
Apple and Broadcom have convinced the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to order a new trial to review its $1.1 billion damages loss in a patent infringement case over Wi-Fi technology owned by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
A California district court jury found that the tech giants had infringed the university’s patents in a ruling handed down in January 2020. The jury awarded Caltech $837.8 million from Apple, and $270.2 million from Broadcom, based on a calculation of how much Caltech would have licensed the patents for.
Three of the four judges agreed with the district court’s rulings on all other issues, but vacated the jury’s damage award and remanded for a new trial on the issue, saying that the way the two-tier damages were calculated was “legally unsupportable”.
Caltech claimed that the damages judgment was proper and based on estimated running-royalty rates for each defendant and that the “exclusion” of evidence was not an abuse of discretion.
But the majority claimed that Caltech’s royalty rates were derived from “non-comparable” settlements and based on “improperly-excluded” expert opinions and unrelated calculations.
The judges were also asked to consider the district courts rulings on patent eligibility, infringement, validity, and inequitable conduct, but sided with the lower court’s rulings in all other instances.
Dyk’s dissent
Judge Timothy Dyk offered a dissenting opinion on the ruling, arguing that the infringement ruling should be reversed entirely, believing that neither Apple nor Broadcom infringed any of Caltech’s three patents.
He argued that the district court's denial of Apple and Broadcom’s post-trial judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) motion provided no analysis of how Caltech established infringement of the patents, instead “relegating this question to a footnote” saying that they found arguments against infringement “unpursuasive”.
He said: “Here, no showing of literal infringement has been made that can support the jury’s infringement verdict under the district court’s claim construction, which is not challenged by Caltech.”
Case background
Caltech had alleged that certain Wi-Fi chips and Apple products that utilised these chips, infringed on its patents related to Wi-Fi encoders.
It sued Broadcom and Apple inMay 2016, claiming that several Apple products including iPhones, Macbooks, and iPads, included the infringing chip.
Both defendants denied any infringement and asserted counterclaims for declaratory judgment of non-infringement and Apple filed multiple inter partes reviews challenging the validity of the patents.
The district court denied their motions and granted Caltech’s summary judgment motion for inequitable conduct. It also held a hearing to discuss claim limitation over the usage of the word “repeat” in the patent claims, which it said referred to its “plain and ordinary meaning” and then proceeded to trial.
Following trial, the district court jury ruled that Apple and Broadcom were guilty of infringing the patents in January 2020, leading both to appeal the decision to the Federal Circuit.
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