After Five Losses, Apple Finally Wins A Round In $600M Virnetx Facetime Patent Mega-Battle

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple has won the latest round in its nine-year patent mega-battle with VirnetX - with a US appeals court rejecting a $600m jury decision and sending it back down to the district court to redecide.

The victory saw Apple's share price go up by more than one per cent but, in an indication of their comparative sizes, VirnetX's share price collapsed by 50 per cent on news of the decision [PDF] on Friday. As everyone has had time to digest the decision, however, VirnetX's share price has partially recovered - in large part because Apple is still on the hook for most of the $600m award.

The lower court will now have to decide whether to hold another trial and revisit the whole issue or revise its patent award in light of the successful appeal.

At the heart of the fight are four patents that VirnetX holds that it says Apple infringes with its iPhones and iPads. All of them cover VPNs but the most recent court decision split the four in two groups, with one covering external domain names and the other covering internal network addressing.

The court decided that the first two (6,502,135 and 7,490,151) are infringed by Apple in its VPN on Demand service but that the second two (7,418,504 and 7,921,211) which are used in its popular FaceTime service are not.

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