Apple seems to have its hands full with lawsuits all the time. If it’s not Samsung, then it’s MobileMedia and the following the general trend in recent times, it has gone against Apple. MobileMedia is a joint holding company formed by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA, a Denver based outfit that licences standards for MPEG patents. They currently hold about 300 patents, most of them contributed by Sony and Nokia; these patents are applicable to most if not virtually all electronic devicesright from smartphone’s to PCs to cameras, laptops, gaming consoles etc.
Apple has been implicated for three patent violations against MobileMedia. These patents are – 6,427,078, which is related to camera phone technology, the other two are related to call handling and are numbered 6,253,075 and 6,070,068 respectively. Apple has been accused of several other violations such as image rotation when the lawsuit was initially filed in July, 2010. At that point in time, MobileMedia had accused Apple of violating 18 patents owned by the company. The jury trial however began last month and after a gruelling month of testimonies, only three were held to be infringed.
Apple is facing setbacks not only in the courtroom, but also Wall Street. With frigid response in China to Apple’s iPhone 5, Apple shares fell sharply and ended nearer to $500, touted as the ‘magic’ mark. Apple’s share price has been falling after it became the most valuable company in the world briefly in 2012. Critics and analysts have panned the company for not taking the iPhone line forward through revolutionary technology. Apple has adopted a very safe approach to the smartphone industry in the last two years, with incremental upgrades in both the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. The iPhone 4 was the last major design change in the iPhone family.
Apple’s woes don’t end here. It has also been extensively panned by customers after the Maps fiasco, which the company has sought to remedy by allowing Google Maps back in to the App Store. Overall, Apple seems to have caught a bit of bad luck lately, and investors and fans are hoping the company will be able to sourt out its legal issues at the earliest and get back to concentrating on innovation rather than patent trolling.
