Apple has been accused of stealing key technologies that underpin the App Store and iTunes for more than a decade, and of having managed to escape in court by bribing, blackmailing and threatening judges: the accusation is made by Patrick Racz, an inventor according to which your company/technology smart flash it is essential for the functioning of the two software services mentioned above. After years of battles in court, Racz recently opened a new lawsuit against Apple, which according to his estimates could earn him up to 18 billion dollars.
It doesn’t take much effort – a simple Google search is enough, in fact – for the term Racz to be associated with a certain insistence “patent troll“: the inventor seems to have founded a company only to fight Apple in court, and as Apple’s own lawyers have observed, the company “makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no presence in the US” and “leverage current patent law to obtain royalties on technologies that Apple has invented.”
Racz’s story is that in 2001 a partner company, called Gemplus and described as “closely related to Steve Jobs and Apple”, had plagiarized his work and had shared sensitive information with Apple. Apparently these actions would have caused the collapse of Smartflash; it’s not entirely clear what happened to Gemplus, for example whether Apple ever actually paid it for its contributions. In court, things went something like this:
- In 2012 Racz filed the first complaint
- In 2015 Racz gets a first victory. A jury ruled that Apple would have to pay $533 million in damages.
- Racz files a second complaint
- Apple is appealing the first judgment arguing that the judge overestimated the extent of the damages, thereby misleading the jury.
- The appeal is accepted and a new judge agrees with Apple.
- In 2016, however, the US patent office says Racz’s patents are invalid because they are too abstract.
- In 2017, in light of this development, the entire case was dropped.
- Between 2015 and 2017, Racz says he was forced to file a long and expensive series of appeals, including 48 individual appeals in the US Patent Office.
In his new statements, Racz says that after years of investigation he has gathered evidence that the patent office’s appellate court judgment was heavily influenced by the bonuses awarded in case of victories for Apple, and that the evaluation panel included a number of lawyers who had previously worked for Apple. For the moment, no tangible proof has been provided. Apparently, Racz does not intend to stop at Apple: he says that his technology is exploited without royalty by Samsung, Amazon and Alphabet, no less.
