Huge companies such as Apple are often the target of patent trolls. This is because many of these trolls are hoping that these companies wouldn’t mind shelling out some money just to settle the case and get it out of the way, as opposed to taking it to court and having it drag out forever.
A couple of years ago, one patent troll by the name Smartflash appeared to have succeeded with their win against Apple and scored a $533 million payout, but unfortunately victory was relatively short-lived because a US federal appeals court has basically reversed the decision in which Smartflash would no longer be entitled to their payout.
According to the panel, they claim that Smartflash’s patents were too abstract to begin with and did not go far enough in describing an actual invention would would have warranted its protection. The judges also said that the original presiding judge should have ruled the company’s patents invalid to begin with, and should have set aside the verdict entirely.
Neither Smartflash nor Apple have yet to comment on the recent events, but we can only imagine that Apple must be pretty chuffed by all of this. According to the report from Reuters, Smartflash has similar cases filed against the likes of Samsung, Google, and Amazon, but given this ruling we’re pretty sure those other cases probably wouldn’t work out in their favor either.