It’s not even been a month since Apple put on file (after disbursing a lot of money) a VirnetX lawsuit related to patent infringement in the FaceTime. For it seems that, even in the quarantine, Cupertino’s lawyers have no rest: another company recently filed a lawsuit against Apple for the same service.
The claimant, this time, is the VoIP-Pal, a “non-practicing entity” – that is, basically a company that does not sell or offer any products / services, basing its revenue on patent licensing and on this type of lawsuit that it moves against companies that are potentially violating them. In other words, a good old patent troll.
According to VoIP-Pal, FaceTime and iMessage infringe its patent, number 10,218,606 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which describes IP-based communication methods with external networks – that is, a diffuse idea that can basically describe any type of remote communication.
It is worth noting that the registration of the patent held by VoIP-Pal was completed only in 2018, eight years after the launch of FaceTime and seven years after the genesis of iMessage – that is, it is not known how the company intends to show in court that Apple copied his ideas before they even existed.
This is not the first time that VoIP-Pal and Apple have been in court: the patent troll have filed several lawsuits against Apple over the past decade. The last of them, closed at the end of last year, had a favorable decision for Cupertino because a California judge found the charges «too general». Hmm…
Anyway, we will have to wait to see the result of this new action.
via Patently Apple
