A Wisconsin federal judge on Tuesday denied Apple’s bid to undo a jury’s finding it must pay the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) $234 million in damages for infringing a computer processor patent, but denied WARF’s request to triple the award, reports the Law360 website.
Last October U.S. District Court Judge William M. Conley agreed with a jury’s finding that Apple infringed on six claims of a patent with its A7 and A8 system-on-chip designs. The judge dismissed Apple’s motions for judgment as a matter of law on liability, literal infringement claims and damages. On the bright side for Apple, the jury didn’t find find Apple to have willfully infringed on the patent, so WARF’s bid to significantly enhance damages was nixed.
In early 2013, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation filed a lawsuit saying that Apple’s A7 processor (which is now up to version A9) infringed a university-developed patent that improves “the efficiency and performance of contemporary computer processors. The patent (number 5,781,752) is for a “table based data speculation circuit for a parallel processing computer.”
