Appeals court: Apple didn't infringe on University of Wisconsin-Madison's patent; court throws out $234M in damages, makes $272M more in levied fines unlikely
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling closes out one of the largest university patent wins ever scored against Apple. A jury first found in 2015 that Apple's chips infringed Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patents and faced up to $862M, then awarded $234M-plus on the microchip claim; a Wisconsin judge later expanded the exposure to $506M covering the A7, A8, and A8X system-on-chip designs in a judgment Apple immediately appealed.
The appeals court's non-infringement finding unwinds both layers of that liability — the $234M award and the roughly $272M in additional fines tied to it — and the Supreme Court's later decision to leave the reversal standing (cert denied in 2019) confirms it as the final word.
First-order effects
- Apple sheds a potential half-billion-dollar-plus liability without paying anything, after having accrued the $506M judgment against its A-series chip lineup since 2017.
- The University of Wisconsin-Madison loses both the $234M damages award and the realistic path to the additional $272M in levied fines, wiping out the case's entire expected recovery.
Second-order effects
- The reversal weakens the leverage of other patent holders litigating against Apple — as in the VirnetX VPN case, where an appeal later invalidated a $502.8M verdict — signaling that large jury awards against Apple are reversible at the appellate stage.
- Universities and licensing foundations may reprice settlement offers earlier in litigation rather than betting on jury verdicts surviving appeal, given two high-profile Apple verdicts undone on review.
Third-order effects
- If appellate courts keep treating design-around and infringement questions in complex silicon as non-infringement, patent-holding universities lose litigation as a monetization strategy for chip patents, pushing them toward upfront licensing deals instead.
- Large tech companies gain a structural advantage in patent disputes: the ability to absorb years of litigation costs while verdicts get pared back or erased on appeal, raising the effective cost of suing them.
The trend: Big patent verdicts against Apple are increasingly being reversed or invalidated on appeal, shifting bargaining power from patent holders toward deep-pocketed defendants.