Federal jury finds Apple infringes on wireless patents, awards Core Wireless $7.3M, as Apple settles suit with retail employees wanting timely breaks for $2M
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors :
Context & Ripple Effects
This verdict is a reversal for both sides of an old fight: in March 2015, a jury found Apple did not infringe the same Nokia-originated patents held by Conversant subsidiary Core Wireless, per the earlier trial over those Nokia-filed patents. Eighteen months later, a different federal jury reached the opposite conclusion and put a $7.3M price tag on it.
The retail piece is smaller but separate: Apple paid $2M to settle claims from store employees over timely breaks, resolving a workforce dispute alongside the IP loss. The Core Wireless award also foreshadows what became a pattern — Apple went on to lose a $145.1M WiLan wireless-patent verdict in 2018 and a $31M Qualcomm jury award in 2019.
First-order effects
- Apple owes Core Wireless $7.3M in damages and $2M to retail employees under the breaks settlement — modest sums against Apple's scale, but a clean courtroom win for a licensing firm that had lost these patents at trial the year before.
Second-order effects
- A plaintiff-side win over Nokia-derived wireless patents strengthens the case for other IP licensors to take Apple to trial rather than settle cheaply — the WiLan and Qualcomm verdicts that followed show non-practicing and chip-level plaintiffs doing exactly that.
Third-order effects
- Wireless patent litigation against Apple hardens into a recurring cost of doing business, with verdicts large enough to matter to licensors yet routinely trimmed after trial — WiLan's award was later reduced from $145M to $85M — shaping how both sides value settlements versus verdicts.
The trend: Patent-holding firms are treating Apple as a repeat deep-pocket defendant in wireless IP cases, with jury wins becoming frequent enough that post-trial damage reductions are now part of the expected lifecycle.