Less than a month after Apple paid $440M to settle one FaceTime patent infringement claim, it is now faced with another.
Apple fought a claim from VirnetX for almost a decade before finally deciding to settle the case last month in order to end the drawn-out battle …
Patently Apple reports that VoIP-Pal.com is claiming both FaceTime and iMessage infringe one of its own patents for routing messages over the Internet.
To say that the lawsuit seems a stretch is something of an understatement. It literally begins with the history of telephony back to directly-connected telephone systems.
It then takes us painfully through the history of communications systems between then and now, before attempting to argue that it invented the idea of connecting people together over a mix of private and public networks.
Since the patent application was only filed in 2018, while FaceTime was launched in 2010, and iMessage in 2011, it’s hard to see how VoIP-Pal.com can claim it invented technology Apple was using eight years earlier.
