Last week, we reported on an accusation by VoIP-Pal that Apple was infringing one of its patents with the FaceTime it’s the iMessage.
Now, the Apple counterattacked the patent troll (a company that buys patents to prosecute anyone who infringes them) in a new complaint filed with the Northern California District Court, in which the company claims not to have infringed patent number 10,218,606.
Precisely, the registry describes IP-based communication methods with external networks, as well as features of automatic call routing, support of dial-up assistants and use of identifiers in such networks.
In the document sent by Apple to the American court, the company not only claims that it did not infringe these patents, but asks the court to invalidate its functional claims, since they are «identical» or «very similar» to patents that have already been invalidated. .
In addition to the fact that VoIP-Pal is a “non-practicing entity”, another feature of the patent makes it lose even more credibility: its registration was completed only in 2018, eight years after the launch of FaceTime and seven years after the creation of iMessage.
Previously, Judge Lucy Koh, who is presiding over the case, found that six other VoIP-Pal patents were invalid because they were too “generic”. It is likely, then, that the patent troll have the same end. We’ll see.
via AppleInsider
