Apple and Qualcomm have been engaged in a legal cat-and-mouse game for a long time now, filing a number of lawsuits against each other in the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world. Don’t worry, we’re here to help — you’ll find all the latest developments right here.
Apple and Qualcomm are engaged in what will likely be a long and epic legal battle. Apple disputed Qualcomm’s legal right to charge heightened royalties for use of its tech, and Qualcomm requirement that Apple pay a percentage of the iPhone’s revenue in return for the use of Qualcomm patents, and Apple has sued the company in three countries.
In the United States, Apple is suing Qualcomm for a hefty $1 billion — but it has also filed a lawsuit in China against the company for $145 million, and it has another suit pending in the United Kingdom. Qualcomm has followed with its own countersuit.
Here’s everything you need to know about the lawsuit battle, and its related battles, so far.
Earlier, Apple was ordered to stop selling iPhones in China, but the company seems to have found a bit of a loophole against the preliminary injunction. According to Apple, the patents in question are only being used in earlier versions of iOS — so phones with more recent forms of the operation system are still fair game. In a bid to resolve the issue quickly, Apple will be pushing a software update in China to Chinese iPhones. With the update, Apple says it believes its in compliance of court orders, and able to continue selling iPhones. Ultimately, it will be up to the court to decide if Apple is still infringing on Qualcomm patents or not.
Of course, Qualcomm isn’t too happy that Apple is still selling iPhones in China. The company has reportedly presented evidence to the court that Apple is still selling the iPhone (which wouldn’t have been hard given the number of Apple Stores), and it all be asking the court to uphold the injunction.
Apple has also said that a sales ban of the iPhone in China could force the company to settle with Qualcomm, which may end up hurting China’s smartphone industry.
“Apple will be forced to settle with the Respondent, causing all mobile phone manufacturers to relapse into the previous unreasonable charging mode and pay high licensing fees, resulting in unrecoverable losses in the downstream market of mobile phones,” sad Apple in a court filing, which was verified by Bloomberg .
The Fuzhou Intermediate People’s Court of China has granted Qualcomm’s request for two preliminary injunctions against four of Apple’s Chinese subsidiaries. The action has been taken as a result of Qualcomm’s claims that technology found in the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X infringes on two of Qualcomm’s patents. This comes after the Chinese patent office, SIPO, found the patents to be valid.
While the compensation sought by Qualcomm is currently not known, it is known that the patents in question involve adjusting the size and appearance of photographs, and managing applications on a touchscreen device.
In the most recent episode in the legal saga, Qualcomm has accused Apple of stealing valuable trade secrets, and giving them to Intel to boost the performance of Intel’s chips on iPhones.
The claim was made as a part of court filing made on September 24,2018, in a Superior Court in San Diego. Qualcomm accuses Apple of breaking a master software agreement Apple signed onto when it became a customer of Qualcomm’s, and of sharing elements of source code and tools used in Qualcomm’s chips with Qualcomm rival Intel.
Qualcomm is asking the court to join this claim to a similar case it brought against Apple, in which Qualcomm accused the iPhone giant of not allowing pre-agreed audits on the use of Qualcomm’s source code. However, Qualcomm asserts that these charges are serious enough to stand on their own should the court not allow the two cases to be merged at a planned April hearing. Qualcomm has supplied no evidence yet, but has pointed to discussions between Intel and Apple engineers discovered in the course of an investigation.
Attorneys representing the U. S. International Trade Commission (ITC) have issued statements supportive of Qualcomm’s claims regarding Apple’s alleged patent infringement, according to a report from Reuters. It is important to note that this case is just getting started, however. The ITC attorneys are only acting as advisers and the judge overseeing the trial is not required to follow the ITC’s advice. That being said, judges do take the ITC’s opinions’ seriously, so the ITC statements are is a blow to Apple’s case.
Qualcomm is now facing a $1.2 billion fine from antitrust regulators in Europe after investigations revealed that Qualcomm had been paying Apple to use its chips over chips from competitors. The practice reportedly began in 2011 and ended in 2016, and included baseband chips that controlled network connectivity and 4G LTE signals.
According to regulators’ investigations, Qualcomm paid Apple “billions of dollars” to shut out competitors. If Apple stopped using a Qualcomm chip in a device, the payments would stop and Apple would be told to return a percentage of the payments made.
It’s unclear exactly how this will affect the chip royalties dispute between the two companies.
On Thursday, December 21,2017, a federal magistrate judge in San Jose, California granted a request for sanctions against Apple, and implemented a $25,000 per day fine for refusing the court’s deadline to hand over evidence in a federal suit against Qualcomm. The fine has been made retroactive to December 16, and will continue through December 29. Should Apple fail to produce all 1.3 million documents outlined in a court order from October, Judge Nathaniel Cousins has made clear his intentions to up the fine even further.
The documents in question are evidence with regard to the lawsuit claiming Qualcomm has imposed unfair licensing terms on smartphone makers. In response to the fine, Apple noted, “We have already produced millions of documents for this case and are working hard to deliver the millions more which have been requested in an unprecedented timeframe.” Qualcomm has not commented.
This fine, oddly enough, is only tangentially related to Apple’s own battle against Qualcomm.
