Texas firm suing Apple over call forwarding feature found in iPhone 4S/5

Apple’s no stranger to being on the defendant side of patent infringement lawsuits. In addition to its ongoing court battle with Samsung, there are a number of smaller companies hoping to squeeze some money out of the tech giant via patent suits. And today, we’re adding another one to the list.

Texas-based Bluebonnet Telecommunications filed a lawsuit against Apple yesterday in an [surprise] Eastern District Texas courtroom, claiming that the call forwarding feature found in the company’s iPhone 4S and 5 handsets infringes on one of its patents it has owned for over a decade…

The patent in question is U.S. Patent No. 5,485,511, which as AppleInsider notes, covers a “method and apparatus for determining the telephony features assigned to a telephone.” More specifically, it describes a telephone that talks to a central switch to display a list of telephony features.

On the surface, Bluebonnet looks like your typical patent troll. It acquired the 511 patent from Siemens Rolm Communications back in June of 1996, and in addition to this Apple lawsuit, it is using it in infringement suits against a number of high profile tech companies includingPantech and Samsung.

The firm is seeking financial damages resulting from the 511 patent infringement, as well as a permanent injunction barring Apple from further infringingment. The company is also requesting that the court add pre-judgment and post-judgment interest on the total amount of damages awarded.

You can follow the case under Civil Action No. 2:13-cv-00513, no judge has been assigned yet.

In somewhat related news, it was announced earlier today that Apple’s IP chief, Boris Teksler, has left the company to join French media company Technicolor.

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Apple wins court order blocking class action in anti-poaching lawsuit

Apple, along with Google and five other Silicon Valley technology heavy-weights, has won a court order blocking a potentially devastating class-action antitrust lawsuit concerning alleged anti-poaching conspiracy.

Bloomberg reported that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh Friday denied class action certification over accusations that said companies illegally conspired not to recruit one another’s employees, which the plaintiffs said resulted in their incomes being held down by their employers…

Joel Rosenblatt, writing for Bloomberg, reported that the ruling prevents former employees from claiming class action status in their suit, though Koh left the door open for the plaintiffs to try again for class certification and eventually sue as a group…

The case can’t proceed now as a class action, partly because “plaintiffs examples, though compelling, may not be sufficient to show that all or nearly all class members were affected by the anti-solicitation agreements without additional documentary support or empirical analysis,” Koh wrote in the ruling.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs said in a written statement that a renewed motion will be filed, citing the significant amounts of evidence suggesting these illegal anti-poaching agreements were commonplace. As we reported earlier, the case could see the current Apple CEO Tim Cook and the former Intel CEO Paul Otellini both questioned.

In addition to Apple and Google, the suit also names four other high-profile companies: chip giant Intel, Photoshop maker Adobe, media empire Walt Disney’s Pixar animation unit, software maker Intuit and film and television production powerhouse Lucasfilm.

Reuters adds that Judge Koh was “keenly aware” new evidence had recently become available that could support class certification.

Should the plaintiffs’ succeed with a renewed motion, Apple, Google and others may potentially face civil damages in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars based on tens of thousands of people who were affected by the alleged anti-poaching agreements.

Bulk of the evidence includes email communication exchanged between top executives, including late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. One such incriminating piece of evidence is the back-and-forth between Steve Jobs and Palm CEO Edward Colligan where Steve complained about our Apple employees being actively recruited by Palm rather they deciding themselves they wanted to join Palm.

Jobs also sent an email to the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2007, demanding that the Internet giant stop poaching Apple employees. The Verge has a nice gallery of these email messages, if you’re eager to read them.

What’s really interesting is that most of those exchanges end with lines like “no one can know about this” so clearly these CEOs had been aware they were engaging in illegal practices.

Be that as it may, such gentleman’s agreements no doubt hurt workers as in turn both their wages and employment choices on the free marketplace get severely restricted.

Perhaps we need stricter laws preventing these kinds of workforce abuse?

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ITC judge finds Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple’s text selection patent

In a decision issued on March 26, but kept classified until earlier this week, an International Trade Commission judge found Samsung to be infringing on Apple’s US RE41,922 patent that covers things like text selection and translucent buttons.

It’s only a preliminary decision, and the judge only found Samsung guilty of infringement on one of two patents listed in the complaint. But if the decision gets upheld, Samsung could once again be looking at a major product ban in the US…

Reuters reports:

“Samsung Electronics Co Ltd infringed a key portion of an Apple Inc patent by including a text-selection feature in its smartphones and tablets, an International Trade Commission judge said in a preliminary decision…

…If it is upheld, the ITC can order any infringing device to be barred from importation into the United States. Apple has alleged that Samsung’s Galaxy, Transform and Nexus devices, among others, were among those made with the infringing technology.”

The patent in question is labeled a “method or apparatus for providing translucent images on a computer display,” and the features in Samsung’s products that seem to be infringing on it are text selection in its browser and the buttons in its Photo Gallery.

Apple filed the original complaint with the ITC in mid-2011, and initially it included 7 patents. Samsung was found guilty of infringing on four of them last October, and Judge Thomas Pender was asked to reexamine two of them, which brings us to today.

Although we’re still a ways off from a definitive outcome here—the full ITC commission isn’t expected to rule until August, and then there will almost certainly be appeals—the ramifications of it could be huge. Several Samsung products could face sales bans.

Of course, it seems like we’ve heard this story before, and nothing ever happens. In fact, look at Apple’s big $1 billion victory against Samsung last fall. That settlement has since been cut in half, and who knows when, or if, Samsung will have to pay it.

I get that you have to defend your intellectual property, but this just all seems like such a waste of time and resources.

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