Apple has won a patent infringement case against BillJCo, a company that appears to be a patent troll. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that invalidated a phone location patent Apple was accused of copying.
In 2021, BillJCo filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming Apple’s Beacon technology infringed on six of its patents. Apple challenged the validity of each patent at the PTAB, which agreed with the tech giant that claims in the ‘011 patent were obvious based on a previously published patent application and a 2005 academic paper on radio-frequency-based location tracking.
The Federal Circuit rejected BillJCo’s argument that the PTAB misread a key term in the patent. The decision was written by Judge Jimmie V. Reyna.
Apple’s iBeacon, brought in 2013, is an indoor positioning system that the company says is “a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS devices of their presence.” In Apple retail stores, it can do things like inform customers of promotional discounts.
A “patent troll” is an individual or organization that purchases and holds patents for unscrupulous purposes such as stifling competition or launching patent infringement suits. In legal terms, a patent troll is a type of non-practicing entity: someone who holds a patent but is not involved in the design or manufacture of any product or process associated with that patent.
This case highlights the ongoing challenges that innovative companies face from patent trolls and the importance of robust patent defense strategies in the technology sector.
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