Only one day after a Tyler Texas jury awarded Smartflash $532.9 million for Apple infringing their suit of patents, Smartflash LLC and Smartflash Technologies Limited filed a second patent infringement lawsuit against Apple. The lawsuit actually mentions the verdict of February 24, 2015 as proof of Apple's guilt. In the new case, while listing the very same patents used against Apple in the first trial, they've added a single new patent that Apple has allegedly infringed. In total there are seven patents listed in this new case.



Factual Allegations

The following is from Smartflash's lawsuit filed with the Tyler Texas court. This segment of the lawsuit is titled "Factual Allegations" and in-part is noted as follows:

"The patents-in-suit generally cover devices, methods, and systems for transmitting, retrieving, downloading, storing, and accessing content, content information, DRM data, payment data, and supplementary data. For example, some of the claims in the patents-in-suit cover devices that retrieve data, store data, and manage access to the data via payment information and/or use rules. As another example, some of the claims in the patents-in-suit cover a computer system (e.g., one or more connected servers) or a supply server that transmits content or data to requesters.

In or around the year 2000, Patrick Racz, one of the co-inventors of the patents-in-suit, met with various personnel of Gemplus (now Gemalto S.A.) to discuss the technology claimed in the patents-in-suit. Mr. Augustin Farrugia was one of the people at Gemplus who learned of the technology of the patents-in-suit.

Mr. Farrugia subsequently joined Apple and is currently a Senior Director at Apple Inc.

On February 24, 2015, a jury determined that Apple willfully infringed claim 13 of the '720 patent, claim 32 of the '221 patent, and claims 26 and 32 of the '772 Patent."

About 90% of the remainder of this new lawsuit repeats itself from the first lawsuit that you could be reviewed here for details. In this current case, the differences are as follows. 1. They removing all references to Game Circus, Hero Academy, WizardBlox, Grub Guardian and other gaming company and/ or title references. 2) They've added a single new patent to the lawsuit which is patent 8,794,516 which was granted to them after the original trial had begun, and 3) the list of the infringing device has been modernized as noted further below.





Apple has committed and continues to commit acts of infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271 with (i) its iPhone 6, the iPhone 6+, iPad mini 3, and iPad Air 2 devices containing any version of iTunes that can access the iTunes Store and/or any version of the App Store app; and (ii) Apple's internal servers, including those involved in operating Apple's iTunes Store, including Apple's App Store, as well as Apple's servers involved in Apple's in-application payment functionality or availability of iTunes Store, App Store, or content via iCloud as well as Apple's servers involved in Apple's iAd Network (collectively referred to as "Apple's Accused Instrumentalities").

In committing these acts of infringement, Apple acted despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of at least one valid patent, and Apple actually knew or should have known that its actions constituted an unjustifiably high risk of infringement of at least one valid and enforceable patent.

The patent infringement case presented in today's report was filed in the Texas Eastern District Court on February 25, 2015. At present, no Judge has been assigned to the case.

No news has yet surfaced regarding Apple filing an appeal regarding the original case which Apple's legal counsel vowed would occur after the verdict was handed down.

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