BEAUMONT – The patent infringement cases filed by German company Papst Licensing GMBH & Co. KG against Apple Inc. and ZTE Corp. and ZTE (USA) Inc. have been settled. Specific monetary terms of the settlement have not been publicly disclosed.
Papst claimed it owned the data transfer technology that Apple used allegedly starting as far back as 2007. The joint motion to dismiss, filed Dec. 29, 2017, in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas, notes that the dispute has been settled among all the parties, and “...the claims asserted by Papst against ZTE shall be dismissed with prejudice, the counterclaims asserted by ZTE against Papst shall be dismissed with prejudice, and the answers and affirmative defenses asserted by ZTE against Papst shall be dismissed without prejudice.”
The original complaint, filed Nov. 30, 2015, alleged that four patents, the '399, '746, '144, '437 were infringed upon. The complaint noted “The ’399, ’746, ’144 and ’437 patents are generally directed towards methods and systems for the transfer of data and in particular to interface devices for communication between a computer or host device and a data transmit/receive device from which data is to be acquired or with which two-way communication is to take place.”
According to Apple Insider in 2015, “The patent's claims detail a communications system capable of compensating for transmission delays and varying transmission rates by checking whether data units sent from one node were received by a second node.”
Specific allegations are that “Apple has infringed and continues to infringe the Papst patents by making, selling, offering for sale, importing, and using products and software in an infringing manner, including but not limited to Apple’s iPad, iPod and iPhone products, as well as any other products operating in a substantially similar manner. Moreover, Apple provides its customers with the accused software and instructs its customers to use the software in an infringing manner, including through its website at https://support.apple.com/manuals/,” according to the original complaint.