Apple has been ordered to pay $502.6 million to VirtnetX Holding Corp in the long-running patent suit between the two companies, Bloomberg reports. The case, which has been bouncing around the courts in various forms since before 2012, accuses Apple of infringing on VirnetX’s secure communications related patents in its FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage implementations.
Apple has been consistently denying and challenging these claims in court, of course, with the most recently result being judgment last fall against Apple in the amount of $439.7 million, higher than the original $368.2 million ruling from 2012, but considerably less than a 2016 judgement for $625 million. This latest verdict is likely to be a short-lived victory, however, since The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has already declared all four of the patents in question as invalid in other cases that are currently before the U.S.
Court of Appeals, however these cases are still ongoing and those decisions are non-binding until all appeals have been exhausted.
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