Apple will pay $25 million to settle a patent lawsuit covering patents related to technology used in Apple’s Cover Flow and Time Machine. Apple will also license the involved patents from Network-1 Technologies’ subsidiary Mirror World Technologies. The patent (No. 6,006,227) dates back to 1999.
Under the terms of the agreement, Apple will receive a fully paid up non-exclusive license to the ‘227 Patent for its full term, which expired in 2016, along with certain rights to other patents in Network-1’s portfolio. Network-1 will receive $25 million from Apple for the settlement and fully paid up license.
The ‘227 Patent was among 9 patents and 5 pending patent applications acquired by Network-1, through MWT, from Mirror Worlds, LLC on May 21, 2013. The ‘227 Patent entitled “Document Stream Operating System” relates to methods that enable unified search, indexing, displaying and archiving of documents in a computer system. The inventions described in the ‘227 Patent resulted from the work done by Yale University computer scientist, Professor David Gelernter, and his then graduate student, Dr. Eric Freeman, in the mid-1990s.
Gelernter and Freeman founded Mirror Worlds LLC, and then fired the first salvo in what would become a long-running patent battle. 2010 saw the company win a $635 million judgement against Apple, however the Cupertino firm later won a reversal of that decision.
Mirror Worlds in 2015 reached a settlement with Microsoft, with the Redmond firm paying out $4.6 million over the same patent.
