Apple and Broadcom win a new trial after persuading a US appeals court to vacate a $1.1B verdict in a patent-infringement case over Caltech's Wi-Fi patents
Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Broadcom Inc (AVGO.O)on Friday convinced a U.S. appeals court to throw out a jury verdict requiring …
Context & Ripple Effects
This verdict dates to January 2020, when a California court split a $1.1B award between an $838M charge to Apple and $270M to Broadcom over Caltech's Wi-Fi transmission patents, and an appeal in March 2020 had already declined to invalidate one of the underlying patents. Friday's ruling reverses the momentum: the appeals court vacated the entire jury verdict and ordered a new trial.
The case fits a wider arc in the corpus — Apple has now seen the Optis $300M wireless verdict thrown out on appeal, a VirnetX $502.8M verdict invalidated via a tribunal ruling upheld on appeal, and eventually settled the Caltech dispute outright in late 2023 rather than re-fight it.
First-order effects
- Apple and Broadcom shed an imminent $1.1B combined liability — the payments ordered in 2020 are uncollectible until a retrial produces a new verdict.
Second-order effects
- Caltech's licensing leverage collapses for now: with the verdict gone, any per-device royalty negotiation restarts from a weaker position, mirroring how Optis lost two trial wins before a jury finally found no infringement.
Third-order effects
- If appellate bodies keep unwinding large jury awards over wireless-standard patents, university and patent-holding plaintiffs are pushed toward early settlement — exactly the path Caltech took — while deep-pocketed defendants gain a structural incentive to litigate past the jury stage.
The trend: Large jury verdicts against Apple over wireless patents are increasingly provisional, with appeals courts and tribunals resetting outcomes and steering patent holders toward settlement.