Court Dismisses VirnetX Suit against Apple on FaceTime App

Case Filed: Aug 05, 2013

Case Closed: Aug 29, 2013

Court: Texas Eastern District Court

Judge: Leonard Davis

Case Summary:

A patent infringement case was filed by VirnetX and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) against Apple asserting that their patent was infringed. The patent involved in the suit was US8504697, entitled ‘System and method employing an agile network protocol for secure communications using secure domain names’. The patent was issued on Aug 06, 2013 and expires[i] by Oct 29, 2019. VirnetX is the current assignee[ii] of the patent.

According to the Court documents, plaintiffs alleged that Apple infringes the patent by making use of the technology/systems/services as claimed in the ‘697 patent. The accused products named are Apple devices capable of using the FaceTime functionality including:

• Apple iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPhone 5
• Apple iPod Touch 4th Generation and iPod Touch 5th Generation
• Apple iPad 2, iPad 3rd Generation, and iPad 4th Generation, the Apple iPad mini and
• Apple computers running OS X 10.6.6 or higher

FaceTime, the subject of the civil action, is a video chat application that makes it possible to conduct one-on-one video calls between Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac notebooks and desktops.

Plaintiffs sought judgment in favor, preliminary and permanent injunction and an order requiring to pay VirnetX damages, costs and expenses.

Considering the dismissal filed by parties, the Court ordered the civil action to be dismissed without prejudice.

Back in 2010, VirnetX has filed a suit against Apple over security system patents, which resulted in an award of $368M to VirnetX. Apple not only lost the case but also lost its appeal.

For more details on the cases, see 6:13-cv-00581. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.

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[i] Expected expiration date.  Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents.

[ii] MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.