The Federal Circuit sided with Apple and an administrative tribunal that invalidated a phone location patent the tech giant had been accused of copying, according to Bloomberg Law.
In 2021 a company dubbed BillJCo — which appears to me to be a “patent troll” — filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas claiming Apple’s Beacon technology infringed on six of its patents.
However, Apple successfully challenged the validity of each of the patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which agreed with the tech giant that claims in the ‘011 patent were obvious based on a previously published patent application and a a 2005 academic paper on radio-frequency-based location tracking.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected BillJCo’s argument that the PTAB misread a key term in teh patent as “largely premised on claim construction positions that Wednesday and penned by Judge Jimmie V. Reyna.
Debuting in 2013, Apple’s iBeacon is an indoor positioning system that the tech giant says is a “a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS devices of their presence.” In Apple retail stores, it can do things such as informing you of promotional discounts.
By the way, a “patent troll” is an individual or an organization that purchases and holds patents for unscrupulous purposes such as stifling competition or launching patent infringement suits. In legal terms, a patent troll is a type of non-practicing entity: someone who holds a patent but is not involved in the design or manufacture of any product or process associated with that patent.
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Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today
