Apple wins against Optis in latest 3G/4G patent trial

In the latest round of litigation between Apple and Optis, the court has sided with Apple and found three of Optis’ patents obvious and uninventive.

Yesterday, November 25, Justice Meade of the English High Court of Justice, Patents Court, found that Optis’ three patents—namely EP (UK) 2093953B1, EP (UK) 2464065B1 and EP (UK) 2592779B1—which were originally applied for by LG Electronics were invalid.

All three parents are closely related from the same family, with Meade noting that it is common ground that he could decide all the issues by consideration of claims 1 and 4 of EP (UK) 2093953B1 (the “patent”).

While Apple had conceded that the patent is essential to long-term evolution (LTE)—a standard for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices and data terminals—it argued that the patent was obvious and uninventive, and therefore invalid.

Each patent is called “Method for transmitting and receiving control information through PDCCH”, with PDCCH standing for “physical downlink control channel”. PDCCH is the physical control channel in LTE responsible for carrying the downlink control information, which contains critical information for the user equipment.

RAN1 arguments

Optis claimed that the skilled person would be a person engaged in work on RAN1, which is responsible for specification of the physical layer of the radio Interfaces, while Apple said that the skilled person would be a person engaged in the more narrow field of the PDCCH specifically.

Meade noted that there was major disagreement and concluded that, in this case, the skilled person was a “RAN1” person who was attending meetings or providing back-up. However, he said this did not matter to his overall conclusion.

There was also a significant dispute over the level of common general knowledge, with Meade rejecting several of Optis’ arguments in this area, but allowing the company’s contention that it was not general knowledge that the ‘maximum number of hits’ was a metric to use when assessing the degree of success or failure in the simulations presented in the patents.

On obviousness, Meade sided with Apple, finding that the patents in this case were obvious in light of Ericsson, a series of slides called “PDCCH Blind Decoding—Outcome of offline discussions” presented at a RAN1 meeting of February 11-15, 2008.

He said: “In reaching this conclusion I have borne very much in mind that Apple’s case involves a number of sequential steps. But I find that they represent systematic uninventive work and not the use of inappropriate hindsight.”

Wrong ‘direction of travel’

Meade rejected Apple’s argument that the patents were obvious in light of a chapter called “Random Numbers” in the “The Art of Computer Programming” (Knuth).

“By contrast, the case starting from Knuth involves giving the skilled person a bag of solutions and inviting him or her to go and find problems on which to use them. It is worse than that, however, because it involves using the tools provided in Knuth in a particular combination, not just using something that is presented in Knuth as a ready-to-go solution,” said Meade.

He added: “I accept that there could be cases where it would be obvious to take a specific tool or solution and apply it to known tasks or types of tasks for which it was clearly suitable, perhaps quite a lot of different tasks, in the sense that a new glue might obviously be going to work on anything broken. But that is not this case. The direction of travel is all wrong.”

The court also rejected Apple’s insufficiency arguments.

This is “Trial C” in these proceedings and Trials A, B and F have already taken place. In Trial A, Justice Birss found another patent, which has now expired, valid and infringed. Meade, in Trial B, ruled that Apple had infringed a cellular standard-essential patent.

In Trial F, handed down in late September, Meade ruled that Apple must accept a licence on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, even before these terms are determined during a trial scheduled for June 2022.

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