Smartflash LLC sues Apple again over use of same patents in iPhone 6/6 Plus and iPad Air 2
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a repeat engagement: Smartflash LLC is asserting the same patents it has already used against Apple, now attaching them to the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2 rather than an entirely new portfolio. The move extends an assertion campaign that Apple had already been forced to pay for once — a $533M jury award on these patents — making the question less whether Apple infringes than whether the patents themselves survive scrutiny.
That scrutiny was trending the wrong way for plaintiffs: a US appeals court had already overturned a $120M verdict against Samsung by ruling the slide-to-unlock and auto-correct patents invalid, and would go on to strike down Smartflash's own patents outright. The filing also sits at the front end of a wave — Corephotonics sued Apple over the iPhone 7 Plus and 8 Plus two years later, and Apple escalated into counteroffense with its Qualcomm countersuit.
First-order effects
- Apple takes on fresh litigation exposure across three of its highest-volume products, and must re-defend patents it already paid a $533M jury award on — a duplicated legal burden even before any new damages figure emerges.
- Smartflash converts a previously adjudicated portfolio into a second bite at Apple's newer hardware, testing whether the same claims can be monetized again against successive product generations.
Second-order effects
- Other patent holders read the repeat-suit model as viable: Corephotonics' later case against Apple over camera tech in the iPhone 7 Plus and 8 Plus follows the same template of asserting against each new device cycle.
- Apple's posture hardens from defense to offense — the company's countersuit alleging Snapdragon chip infringement against Qualcomm reflects the cost calculus of facing serial assertion.
Third-order effects
- Appellate invalidation is becoming the decisive battleground: the court rulings that voided Smartflash's patents and overturned the Samsung verdict mean headline jury awards increasingly do not survive review, shifting the economics of software-patent assertion away from settlement leverage toward genuine validity risk.
- If the pattern holds, large platform companies like Apple will institutionalize both layered defense and reciprocal suits, raising the effective bar for smaller licensors and non-practicing entities to extract value from device portfolios.
The trend: Software-patent assertions against smartphone makers are multiplying device-by-device even as appellate courts invalidate the underlying patents, steadily eroding the payoff of the assertion business model.