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By Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) – Apple Inc has persuaded a federal judge to dismiss a $ 308.5 million jury verdict it lost to a private licensing company for violating a patent associated with digital rights management .
In a ruling Thursday evening, U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap said Personalized Media Communications LLC (PMC) intentionally delayed filing its application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in hopes of get a bigger payout.
“This court takes the prospect of disrupting the unanimous verdict of a duly constituted jury very seriously,” but PMC’s “deliberate delay strategy” was “a conscious and blatant abuse of the legal patent system,” Gilstrap wrote.
PMC, based in Sugar Land, Texas, claimed in its 2015 lawsuit that the FairPlay software used in Apple’s iTunes service and the App Store to decrypt movies, music and apps violated its patent obtained in 2012. .
But the judge, who sits in Marshall, Texas, accepted Apple’s defense of “prosecution loopholes,” which can prevent a patentee from enforcing a patent after an unreasonable and unexplained delay. Gilstrap said PMC’s delay has lasted for many years.
Jurors had declared Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., Responsible for PMC on March 19, after a week-long trial.
“PMC respectfully disagrees with Judge Gilstrap’s ruling and is considering appealing,” its attorney Douglas Kline of Goodwin Procter said in an email.
Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
PMC’s patent application dated back to applications filed in the 1980s.
Gilstrap said PMC uses a so-called “underwater” patent strategy, filing serial applications, then keeping its patent portfolio “hidden” until the industry broadly adopts the underlying technology.
He said PMC would only charge a license fee or allege a violation after it felt the violation was widespread.
He cited an internal PMC document from 1991 identifying Apple, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Microsoft as “natural candidates” for its strategy.
A June 1 ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal dealing with patent cases facilitated the challenge of submarine patents.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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