According to information from the Bloomberg agency, we know that the lawyers of the company VirnetX filed a lawsuit against Apple yesterday worth 532 million dollars for infringing a series of patents in relation to secure communications over the network.
VirnetX lawyers have gone directly on the offensive from day one to attack Apple mediate a legal procedure scheduled for next week before the East Texas Federal District Court. In the words of Brad Caldwell, VirnetX attorney: “Apple has not played fair. They have taken the intellectual property of VirnetX without permission.
This is not the first time that this company has sued Apple on patent grounds, as in 2012 a jury in Texas found that the FaceTime transmission protocol was based on a VPN patent owned by VirnetX. This resulted in Apple being ordered to pay a total of $ 386,2 million in damages to VirnetX although in the end it did not have to do so as the Federal Court of Appeals estimated the appeal filed by Apple in September of that year.
Anyway Apple has not been the only company in VirnetX's crosshairs, since Microsoft also had to deal with them by reaching an out-of-court settlement in which it paid the company a total of 200 million dollars plus 23 million for another patent used in Skype.
Now it seems that VirnetX wants to again accuse Apple of the same facts although the same arguments cannot be presented again in a new trial. Many They talk about another settlement as happened with Microsoft but for now there is nothing confirmed. After the first ruling by the Federal Court, Apple modified its FaceTime platform to avoid new infractions although VirnetX continues to claim that the modifications are not enough to be considered satisfactory.
The new trial for now involves applications such as FaceTime, iMessage and other secure network features built into various Apple operating systems.