White House gives green light to potential Apple Watch import ban
Biden will not overturn ITC ruling on import ban | AliveCor patent dispute with Apple is ongoing.
President Biden will not overturn an International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling that could halt imports of the Apple Watch into the US, it was announced on Tuesday, February 21.
The ITC’s decision relates to a patent infringement dispute between Apple and AliveCor, a medical device company based in California.
AliveCor has accused Apple of infringing three electrocardiogram (ECG) patents covering its KardiaBand, a wearable heart monitor.
Upholding AliveCor’s complaint, the ITC said that imports of the infringing watches should be banned, but that this would be placed on hold until appeals were finished at the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTAB). The PTAB found in December that AliveCor’s patents were invalid, a decision the company is contesting.
Apple is arguing that the ITC’s import ban would negatively affect public health. The Hill reports that the tech giant hired former chairwoman of the ITC Shara Aranoff to lobby on its behalf, in an effort to convince Biden to block the ban.
But the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) told The Hill that USTR chief Katherine Tai had made the decision not to intervene.
Presidential vetoes of ITC import bans are rare, but have happened in the past if the impact on US consumers and competitiveness is deemed to be too severe.
Patent dispute
The KardiaBand was the first FDA-cleared ECG wristband designed to be used as an accessory with the Apple Watch. From Series 4, the Apple Watch featured built-in ECG monitoring.
AliveCor told the ITC that Apple had copied its technology and driven it out of the market by making its operating system incompatible with the KardiaBand.
In 2021, the company released a statement saying that taking its complaint to the ITC “is one step, among others, AliveCor is taking to obtain relief for Apple’s intentional copying of AliveCor’s patented technology—including the ability to take an ECG reading on the Apple Watch, and to perform heartrate analysis—as well as Apple’s efforts to eliminate AliveCor as competition in the heartrate analysis market for the Apple Watch.”
Apple has gone on the offensive and is countersuing AliveCor for alleged patent infringement in San Francisco federal court.
In December, Apple said that AliveCor filed the lawsuits in response to “its own failures in the market” and said it wants to “set the record straight as to who is the real pioneer” of the technology, as reported by Reuters.
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