A federal judge has postponed his final ruling in the patent infringement lawsuit a Yale professor won against Apple, giving the company more time to dispute an US$625 million penalty, reports “Computerworld” (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9189699/Judge_gives_Apple_temporary_reprieve_in_625M_patent_case?taxonomyId=12).
In an order issued Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis spelled out a schedule that gives Apple and Mirror Worlds until the end of November to submit additional post-trial arguments. Apple is challenging a jury verdict in which the computer maker was ordered to pay as much as US$625.5 million to a company called Mirror Worlds for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed digitally.
Apple was ordered by a jury to pay damages to Mirror Worlds for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed on a computer screen. A federal jury in Tyler, Texas, awarded $208.5 million in damages for each of the patents infringed.
In 2008 Mirror Worlds Technologies, a Texas based company, accused Apple of violating four distinct but related patents that touch on creating “streams” of documents that are automatically sorted according to time stamps, including future dates assigned to calendars and other reminders. The company said that just about all of Apple’s product line infringes on a system for organizing data by time, “but draws its closest connection with the Time Machine backup feature in Mac OS X Leopard.”