Apple Ordered to Pay Ottawa’s WiLan $85 Million USD in Licensing Royalties

In a long and drawn-out case over patent infringement, Apple has been ordered to pay $85 million USD to Canadian company WiLan.

A new Bloomberg report explains that the United States District Court for the Southern District of California has sided with Ottawa, Canada-based WiLan in a licensing battle related to mobile and wireless communication technologies.

Apple was previously ordered to pay the sum of $145 million USD to WiLan — a Quarterhill company — after it was ruled that Apple had infringed patents relating to technology used to make phone calls and download data at the same time. The case dates back to 2014 and the dispute is over tech used in the iPhone 6 and 7.

Apple disagreed with the 2018 court’s decision, saying that the way the damages were calculated was inaccurate. After the previous award was disputed, a judge agreed with Apple that the damages were too high and offered WiLan the option to accept $10 million USD in damages or go back to court. The case went back to court again, resulting in the $85 million USD figure.



WiLAN says “it develops and commercializes innovative patented technologies, manages intellectual property and licenses these inventions to corporations.” Apple was found to have infringed two patents related to wireless communications technology that allowed users to make phone calls and download data simultaneously.

The patents at the heart of the dispute are US patents 8,457,145 and 8,537,757. Owned by Quarterhill, the first patent describes a method for requesting bandwidth in a wireless communication system, whereas the second relates to adaptive call admission control (CAC).

Apple has also been accused of patent infringement by other companies, including a long legal battle with Qualcomm over royalties for the Intel modems used in certain iPhone models.

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