A federal jury in California reduces the damages Apple has to pay Canadian IP licensing company WiLan for infringing on two wireless patents from $145M to $85M
- Federal jury trial was limited to damages after 2018 verdict — Verdict is latest in decade-long saga over royalties
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a damage-only retrial closing out a chapter opened in August 2018, when a California jury ordered Apple to pay WiLan $145.1M for infringing two wireless patents. The new jury was tasked only with re-running the damages math, not relitigating infringement, and it landed at $85M — a $60M haircut on the original figure.
The timing matters: five days later the same state produced the $838M Caltech verdict against Apple and $270M against Broadcom, showing juries were still writing nine-figure checks. But the longer arc in this corpus runs the other way — the VirnetX award came with USPTO invalidating the underlying patents, and a judge later overturned the entire $506M+ PanOptis LTE award — making this reduction part of a pattern of post-verdict erosion.
First-order effects
- WiLan's recoverable claim on these two wireless patents drops from $145M to $85M, cutting the headline value of its decade-long royalty campaign against Apple by more than 40%.
- Apple's immediate liability is fixed at $85M pending any appeal, but it exits the retrial having successfully argued down the per-unit royalty theory the first jury accepted.
Second-order effects
- For non-practicing entities like WiLan, the result reprices litigation risk: a damages-only retrial is now a proven lever for defendants to shrink awards without touching the infringement finding, which affects how licensing portfolios are valued and financed.
- Days after the Caltech jury handed plaintiffs a record-scale win, this cut signals to both sides that jury size is no guarantee of final payout — pushing settlement valuations toward appellate-stage expectations rather than first-verdict numbers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across VirnetX, PanOptis, and now WiLan, the decisive stage of Big Tech patent litigation shifts from the jury room to appeals and USPTO review, structurally discounting what an NPE can bank on from an initial win.
- That discount pressures the pure licensing business model itself: portfolios whose value rests on enforcement payouts face thinner expected returns, favoring litigants with staying power — typically the deep-pocketed defendants.
The trend: Patent assertions against major tech companies are becoming two-stage contests in which jury verdicts are provisional placeholders and appellate or USPTO review increasingly sets the real price of infringement.