Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been accused of Patent Infringement by a Colorado-based Company that bears the name TracBeam. A lawsuit has been filed over the use of TracBeam’s location services provided by Apple on its devices that run on iOS and Mac OS, according to Patently Apple. Also, the applications and services found in Safari browser, Siri and others also use the location services.
Big amounts at stake
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has allegedly infringed four of the TracBeam’s patents. These are US patent #8,032,153, 7,764,231, 7,525,484 and 7,298,327.
In one of the claims, TracBeam has requested the court to give the judgment that the infringement of ‘231, ‘484, and ‘327 patents has been done willfully by Apple. They have also requested that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) should be made to pay triple damages to TracBeam.
The said case has been filed at the Texas Eastern District Court, Tyler Division and no specific judge has been assigned for now to this case.
About TracBeam
The company TracBeam is the plaintiff here. It is an inventor-based company and has won numerous fundamental innovations in wireless location technology patents. These patents are meant for use in consumer and enterprise settings for both the locations, be it inside or outside. The organization and existence of this limited liability company is under the laws of the State of Colorado.
If we use the search engine like Google to search for the website of TracBeam we won’t find one that describes the products and services offered by the company. Rather, the search results throw up a list of patent lawsuits filed by the company against few major companies that include Google, AT&T, T-Mobile and few more. Seeing this history it can be concluded that the said company is a Patent Troll or Patent Assertion Entity.
Most of the tech companies fall prey to Patent Trolls, and according to a study conducted in 2011 they cost these companies about 29 billion. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is the one who faces such charges more than others. While it was the most preferred target of the patent trolls in the first half of 2013, in the second half it was among the top three.
