Qualcomm scored a win in its global patent battle with Apple today as a jury awarded it $31m, deciding Apple infringed 3 of its patents.
The multi-continent, rumbling legal battle between Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) took another twist today with a jury awarding Qualcomm the win for a relatively minor case in the broad legal action currently ongoing between the two companies. Up for dispute in Federal court were three patents Qualcomm claimed Apple infringed which are aimed at speeding up connection times at boot up, GPU efficiency and faster download speeds.
Although the argument was for a relatively paltry total of $31m, it marks a significant point as it was decided by a jury and that jury awarded Qualcomm what it was asking for, namely a licencing fee of $1.41 per infringing iPhone. A drop in the ocean for Apple of course but one which it fought to defend, even claiming that one of its own employees had developed one of the patents underlying technologies and as such should be a co-owner of the intellectual property.
Ultimately the jury disagreed and although not expected to force Apple to the settlement table, the win was enough to send Qualcomm shares cautiously up by just over 2% on the day.
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Keep in mind that this is just the warm up for the major action about to kick off in April between the two companies. An outcome of which has the possibility to force Apple to the negotiating table with potentially huge sums of money changing hands, or to send Qualcomm off licking its wounds with a business model which would appear unsustainable. Obviously the financial ramifications for both companies will be huge.
