The California Institute of Technology or Caltech has filed a lawsuit asking for an injunction over the iPhone 5 and its succeeding iterations, as well as Apple's other newer products that use a patented Wi-Fi technology.
The Wi-Fi technology in question refers to the one Apple and Broadcom made which gave the recent iPhones, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch the faster 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Caltech insisted that the Wi-Fi chips present in the iPhone 5 and more recent iPhones as well as the aforementioned Apple products have decoding and encoding technology that's very similar to its patented technology that increases data flow.
Since Apple and Broadcom collaborated in this tech, they are both being sued by Caltech and the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Central California, Apple Insider has learned. As stated in the complaint, Caltech is seeking a trial by jury and injunctions on Apple products that have infringed the four Wi-Fi related patents of the school.
Should the injunctions be issued, many of Apple's hardware will be prohibited from circulation and these could include the hot products of the company, like the iPhone 6s, the iPhone 6s Plus and the iPad Pro.
Apple and Broadcom have yet to respond to the issue, but Engadget already sees two possible actions from the companies: 1) pay the institute after the trial ends in favor of Caltech or 2) just fix the problem by agreeing to pay an out-of-court settlement. Though Caltech has not stipulated the exact monetary value it is demanding from Apple, it has mentioned that it is seeking for "adequate" compensation.
This is not the first time Apple has been faced with a patent lawsuit from an educational institution. According to The Verge, the tech giant was sued by the University of Wisconsin-Madison last year over a patent on processor performance. The school won the trial by jury and received damages amounting to $234 million.
Additionally, Apple has also been waging a patent war against the South Korean brand, Samsung. Both big tech companies are claiming that the other has been stealing patented technologies, as reported by Fortune.
