High Court finds Apple infringed two more Optis SEPs
In the latest round of an ongoing dispute between Apple and Optis, the England and Wales High Court of Justice has ruled that Apple infringes two of Optis’ mobile phone standard patents.
In a judgment handed down yesterday, March 15, Justice Meade gave the go-ahead for Optis to amend the two patents and denied Apple’s bid to dismiss the amendments and invalidate the patents.
Apple argued that the disclosed inventions were obvious over two pieces of prior art from Nokia and Panasonic. It also attempted to employ an “insufficiency squeeze” against Optis, a move that Meade said was “barely developed” at trial.
Optis’ amendments to the patents were unconditional, and if denied, would have resulted in the revoking of the patents.
Apple said that the proposed amendments should be refused for lack of clarity and added matter.
Obviousness arguments
Throughout the analysis, Meade mainly referred to the European patent (UK) 2,187,549 B1, claiming that the specification differences in the EP (UK) 2,690,810 B1
Apple asked the court to consider whether the “Panasonic” prior art discloses the use of “three spreading codes for ACK/NACK data signals”—acknowledgements or negative acknowledges which indicate that a message has either been correctly received or not.
It also claims that Panasonic taught the use of “mixed resource block” technology in long-term evolution signal transfers and the use of an “MRB” and having an “unused cyclic shift” after a CQI—or an estimate of the maximum data rate that a phone can receive.
Meade rejected all of Apple’s arguments that Panasonic anticipated any of these technologies present in Optis’ amended patents.
“Panasonic looks superficially strong,” Meade said, “But I think it is only superficial”.
For Apple’s obviousness case over Nokia, it relied on a table, referred to as “Table B” which it claimed outlined a “2-cyclic-shift mesh” that Optis had described in claim 1 of the ‘549 patent.
Meade said: “Apple’s case over Nokia is very artificial. Its focus on Table B and its reading of that Table are both unrealistic and involve hindsight to look for something like the claims of the patents. Unlike Panasonic, I do not think that there is even a superficial strength to Apple’s position over Nokia.”
Amendment objections
According to Meade, Apple's objections to Optis’ proposed amendments for lack of clarity “boiled down” to an ultimatum that if it was right about claim interpretation, then the claims lacked clarity.
Apple’s main clarity objection was that it was not clear whether a “code multiplexing structure” (CMS) described in the patent was a feature of the network or a feature of the mobile.
However, Meade had agreed that the CMS was a feature of the network and dismiss this core objection.
Finally, Apple said that there was added matter in the patent amendments, arguing that Optis had added disclosure on the use of certain types of code that were not present in its application. But Meade found the disclosure in the application to be “clear and unambiguous”.
Justice Meade ruled that the patents were essential and infringed by Apple, that the obviousness attacks over prior art failed, that Optis’ proposed amendments were allowable and that the patents in their amended forms were valid.
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