As noted by AppleInsider, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has agreed with a lower court decision to dismiss a patent infringement lawsuit targeting Apple Pay.
In 2017 Universal Secure Registry, a Boston area “enabling technology” company, filed a complaint in United States District Court for the District of Delaware accusing Apple and Visa of infringing patents for electronic payments and identity authentication that paved the way for their mobile payment platforms.
The suit seeks unspecified damages, but details the scope of the infringement, claiming, “since 2014 Apple’s backend servers and Visa’s payment processing network VisaNet, including Visa Token Service, have supported and processed transactions made using Apple Pay, including billions of Apple Pay transactions made in the United States.”
According to the 2017 complaint, “Apple CEO Tim Cook stated at the iPhone 6 launch event in September 2014, ‘[p]ayments is a huge business. Every day between credit and debit we spend $12 billion. That’s over $4 trillion a year and that’s just in the United States. And this business is comprised of over 200 million transactions a day.”
USR purportedly holds a portfolio of 13 U.S. patents, plus additional patents pending and foreign patents authored by Weiss since 2000. The patents focus on software applications that secure and unimpeachable identity authentication can enable. These include payments, secure financial transactions, physical access and a replacement for Weiss’s original SecurID token.
In July 2020, a Delaware federal judge reversed the recommendation of a magistrate judge and tossed a lawsuit alleging Apple and Visa’s “Apple Pay” contactless payment system infringes four security patents, finding that the patents-in-suit cover an abstract idea and are invalid under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice ruling.
Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today
