Apple Inc. v. California Institute of Technology, Appeal Nos. 2019-1580, -1581 (Fed. Cir., March 5, 2020).
In January of this year, a jury awarded the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) $837,801,178 for Apple’s infringement of three patents. One of those patents was U.S. Patent No. 7,116,710. The ‘710 patent claimed methods of encoding a signal by partitioning data blocks into sub-blocks, encoding, and interleaving.
The ‘710 patent was the subject of IPR2017-00210 and IPR2017-00219 filed by Caltech. In both IPRs, the ‘710 patent was not held to be unpatentable. Apple appealed. The case was argued on March 4, 2020, and the next day the Federal Circuit issued a summary affirmance pursuant to Rule 36. Accordingly, the IPRs will provide no reason to set aside the jury award.