Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in a statement shared on live television that Apple has no intention to license Masimo’s patents. While it seemed likely that was the case, the company hadn’t said as much publicly until now.
“We’re focused on appeal,” Cook’s statement said. “There’s lots of reasons to buy the watch even without the blood oxygen sensor.”
No surprise here. Apple’s position, which I expect they’ll likely eventually prevail on, is that none of Masimo’s relevant patents are valid and they should have never been issued. Why pay money to license an invalid patent?
It’s not invalid yet though. As of right now they’re in violation, and they went so far as to hire away Masimo engineers to make them work on a competing product. If you want the tech that badly why NOT license it?
If you want the tech that badly why NOT license it?
Because they don’t think the patent is actually valid. Getting it officially invalidated is a process but if it really should have never been issued in the first place, then Apple is not truly infringing it and has no obligation to pay a cent to anybody else for it.
I don’t really know any of the intricacies, can you elaborate on why they are not valid?
The short version is that a lot of patents were issued in the 90s and early 2000s for “inventions” that actually already existed “but on a computer!” After a lot of legal wrangling the standards got stricter and these never-should-have-been issued patents have been systematically invalidated, though it’s a one-at-a-time process. I think Masimo originally claimed infringement of a dozen patents. From memory, it’s now down to two patents that have not been entirely invalidated, and I think even those have already been carved down to remove most of the claims. So basically there are two half-patents left to litigate and Apple thinks they can finish those off as well.
Apple is more than happy to leverage such patents when it sees fit. They’re just throwing a tantrum because they finally ran into a small corporation that they couldn’t intimidate.
Sure, Masimo filed a bunch of invalid patents… but the two that held up seem pretty valid to me.
They’re not “the same thing but on a computer!”. They are “the same thing but you don’t have to stick a needle in someone, fill a vial with their blood, send the blood off to a laboratory, and wait for them to send you the results”. Real time non-invasive chemical analysis of blood is a genuine invention and Masimo has been leading the world in that for a long time.
I hate patents. I think the world would be a better place without them… but like it or not they exist. And Apple owns a lot of them… so I’m not going to be sympathetic in the slightest when they find themselves on the wrong end of a patent lawsuit.
