Court Issues Judgment in Apple, Mobile Media Ideas Lawsuit

Case Filed: Mar 31, 2010

Case Closed: Oct 03, 2013

Judge: Sue L. Robinson

Court: Delaware District Court

Case Summary:

Mobile Media Ideas filed a lawsuit against Apple alleging that 14 of its patents for electronics were infringed. The patents involved in the suit are:

Patent Number Current Assignee[i]	Issue Date	Expiration Date[ii]	Title
US5737394 Mobile Media Ideas	Apr 07, 1998	Feb 06, 2016	Portable telephone apparatus having a plurality of selectable functions activated by the use of dedicated and/or soft keys
US5915239 Mobile Media Ideas	Jun 22, 1999	Sep 02, 2016	Voice-controlled telecommunication terminal
US6070068 Mobile Media Ideas	May 30, 2000	Mar 19, 2016	Communication terminal device and method for controlling a connecting state of a call into a desired connection state upon a predetermined operation by a user
US6253075 Mobile Media Ideas	Jun 26, 2001	Dec 16, 2018	Method and apparatus for incoming call rejection
US6427078 Mobile Media Ideas	Jul 30, 2002	May 19, 2014	Device for personal communications, data collection and data processing, and a circuit card
US6446080 Mobile Media Ideas	Sep 03, 2002	May 08, 2018	Method for creating, modifying, and playing a custom playlist, saved as a virtual CD, to be played by a digital audio/visual actuator device
US7349012 Mobile Media Ideas	Mar 25, 2008	Jul 17, 2018	Imaging apparatus with higher and lower resolution converters and a compression unit to compress decreased resolution image data
RE39231 Mobile Media Ideas	Aug 08,2006	Dec 19, 2014	Communication terminal equipment and call incoming control method
US6002390 Mobile Media Ideas	Dec 14 1999	Nov 25, 2016	Text input device and method
US6393430 Mobile Media Ideas	May 21, 2002	May 08, 2018	Method and system for automatically recording music data files by using the hard drive of a personal computer as an intermediate storage medium
US6441828 Mobile Media Ideas	Aug 27, 2002	Sep 08, 2018	Image display apparatus
US6549942 Mobile Media Ideas	Apr 15, 2003	May 25, 2015	Enhanced delivery of audio data for portable playback
US6760477 Mobile Media Ideas	Jul 06, 2004	Jan 20, 2019	Method and apparatus for entering data strings including Hangul (Korean) and ASCII characters
US7313647 Mobile Media Ideas	Dec 25, 2007	Aug 07, 2017	Storage and reproduction apparatus

Source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database. Some of the patents-in-suit were initially owned by Sony and Nokia.

Mobile Media Ideas was formed in January 2010 and holds more than 300 patents related to a wide variety of consumer electronics features. The company announced in 2010 it would license patents related to "smartphones, mobile phones, and other portable devices including personal computers, laptops, notebooks, personal media players, e-book readers, cameras, and hand-held game consoles."

As per details in the court filings, in Feb 2010, Apple was notified by letter that its smartphone products and personal media player products have infringed and continues to infringe the patents-in-suit.

In its complaint against Apple, Mobile Media alleged that Apple infringes its patented technology and cites iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPod Touch, Nano, Classic, and Shuffle as the infringing products. It also pointed out that if Apple was allowed to use its patented technology without paying the royalties, they would suffer “irreparable injury".  Wherefore, it sought the Court to declare that defendant has infringed the patents, a permanent injunction enjoining the defendant from infringing its patents, damages, costs and expenses.

In Sep 2013, the Court granted defendant's request for expenses and ordered plaintiff to pay defendant $13,682.08 in expenses on or before September 30, 2013. It also ordered parties to file a stipulated final judgment or a joint letter to the court delineating why agreement on the foregoing cannot be reached.

The parties then filed a stipulation, pursuant to which the Court signed off final judgment and ordered that Apple directly infringes claims 23, 24 of the ‘068 patent, claim 73 of the ’078 patent and does not directly infringe or induce infringement of claims of ‘231, ‘394 and ‘075. 

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

[ii] 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.