Apple lawsuit wrap-up for October 2014

Apple lawsuits in October 2014 ran the gamut from class-action to patent to trademark, and there was a blast from the past no one could have foreseen.

• Apple won a patent lawsuit filed by WiLan after the two LTE patents being used were invalidated.
• Many years ago, Apple used FairPlay, a Digital Rights Management (DRM) to keep unauthorized computers and devices from playing music purchased on iTunes. Now Apple is facing a $350 million anti-trust lawsuit claiming the DRM was used to stifle market competition and make it difficult for customers to move to another platform.
• Russian Railways has to wait until November 20th to appeal a court decision that ruled in favor of Apple. Russian Railways sued Apple after an app used its logo without permission and wants 2 million rubles (approximately $55,807).
• Bose dismissed the patent lawsuit they filed against Beats Electronics after accusing them of infringing on several of their noise-cancelling headphone patents.
• Robert Herskowitz brought a $5 million lawsuit against Apple in 2012 saying that Apple defrauded customers by billing twice for songs purchased in iTunes and they couldn’t get refunds. Later, he joined forces with Phoebe Juel who sued Apple after being charged for a song she already bought but couldn’t locate on her computer. Their combined lawsuit recently got dismissed after they reached a settlement with Apple.
• The High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation brought against Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel after they entered a no-poaching agreement is still continuing. The latest news is the tech workers who brought the lawsuit are asking a federal appeals court to deny the $324.5 million settlement offered.
• It was only a matter of time before angry 2011 MacBook Pro owners sued Apple over its apparent lack of response to the graphical problems they’ve suffered due to faulty hardware. They were forced to pay out-of-pocket to fix their laptops by replacing the logic board, which could be as much as $600. The plaintiffs want Apple to “acknowledge a defect in the 2011 MacBook Pro models, notify owners of the issue, bear the costs of inspection of affected machines, and pay the full costs of repairs and damages.”
• iVoice Enterprises asked India’s Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) to remove Apple’s iPhone trademark from the Trademark Registry. Patently Apple notes that iVoice Enterprises has a trademark for Indian Phone, which they abbreviate as iFon. Is the trademark for Indian Phone or iFon? If the former, then Apple has nothing to worry about. If the latter, then it will probably be up to the courts to decide if iFon is close enough to iPhone to make a difference.
• GPNE Corp. sued Apple using patents originally designed for pagers 20 years ago claiming several iOS products violated them. Since the patents expired, the lawsuit was thrown out, prompting an Apple spokesman to call them a patent troll attempting to “extort money from Apple for 20-year-old pager patents that have expired, wasting time for everyone involved.”