On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Gesture Technology Partners, preserving a lower-court ruling that invalidated one of its patents and handing a victory to Apple, Google, and LG Electronics.
The case centered on whether patent owners can still be challenged over patents that have already expired—an issue the justices left unresolved by denying certiorari.
Inventor Timothy Pryor formed Gesture in 2013. Pryor owns patents related to motion-sensing and other technologies that he began developing in the 1990s.
Gesture sued the tech companies in 2021 for allegedly infringing a patent covering camera technology used in cell phones. Gesture said the companies violated its rights before the patent expired in 2020, and that its validity had not been challenged while it was active.
Apple, Google and LG filed petitions to invalidate the patent at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board later in 2021.
The board canceled most of the patent, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared the entire patent invalid in January.
MacDailyNews Take: The saga ends.
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