Apple has been embroiled in over a decade of lawsuits with one company, and the biggest case so far has just been axed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
As originally reported by CNBC, VirnetX’s bid to overturn a successful appeal between Apple and VirnetX last year will not be heard. VirnetX originally won the $500 million+ lawsuit but the verdict was swiftly overturned in March 2023, where VirnetX then immediately tried to appeal. After almost an entire year, it will not be going ahead.
This is all in relation to a VPN patent filed by VirnetX and subsequently allegedly infringed upon by Apple with iMessage and FaceTime. CNBC reported that VirnetX told the “Supreme Court that letting the rulings stand would incentivize the harassment of patent owners at the board.”
A history of suits
In 2020, The Verge, a major tech outlet, called VirnetX a “patent troll” implying it files patents purely to sit on them and sue companies that infringe on them. This could be due to the sheer volume of filed patents or patents with vague terminology so as to encapsulate many use cases. These patent trials appear to be the central way VirnetX has made its income since being founded in 2005. In that same article from The Verge, it says Virnet X is “a patent-assertion entity that makes money by suing other companies.”
2010 was when VirnetX brought the first of its cases to trial with it winning $23 million in 2014 from Microsoft for a patent infringed by Skype. In 2014, VirnetX originally won $368 million in damages for infringing copyrights from Apple, which was then bumped up to $625.6 million by 2016, thanks to ongoing royalties. These involved four central patents that VirnetX claims are being infringed.
A subsequent retrial also resulted in VirnetX’s favor but two of the patents were deemed invalid in a follow-up trial, with the last two being overturned in March of last year. After 14 years of trials, based on a handful of different patents, Apple has finally seen off this case.
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