Apple Thoughts: Apple Loses in Court to the Tune of $19 Million

"In a rare public legal defeat, Apple this week was found to have infringed on a patent for computing technology and has been asked to pay $19 million dollars in damages. An Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division court handed down the amount on Thursday after ruling that Apple had "willfully" violated three claims in a patent for predictive snooping of cache memory that helps shuttle information between a processor, its memory and other elements of a computer."

No, they didn't lose in the Supreme Court as pictured above, but they did lose. This all started when OPTi filed a lawsuit in 2007 (OPTi previously sued Nvidia in 2006 for the same patent infringement and won that case as well) alleging that Apple violated their patent on "Predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated access." This is a complicated name for how they described transferring data between the "CPU, memory and other devices." According to the article it was a broadly worded patent anyway, but OPTi has chosen to go the route of suing various companies based on patents OPTi holds rather than focusing on developing uses for the technology. Their stated goal is to "realize licensing revenue" from this and other lawsuits. I hate this business model, if that is what it is even called.