Apple has won its appeal in a patent lawsuit related to its Cover Flow and Time Machine technologies, reports “The Mac Observer” (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/court_overturns_cover_flow_patent_ruling_against_apple/).
The new ruling doesn’t invalidate the Mirror Worlds patents. Instead, it only stated that Apple didn’t infringe on the company’s patents, saving the company from a US$625.5 million judgement, says “The Mac Observer.”
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.”
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. The federal jury in Tyler, Texas, awarded $208.5 million in damages for each of the patents infringed.
In October 2010, Apple challenged the order, asking U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for an emergency stay of the Oct. 1 verdict, saying there are outstanding issues on two of the three patents. Apple said patent owner Mirror Worlds would also be “triple dipping” if it were able to collect $208.5 million on each of the patents.