Apple has been ordered to pay $625.6 million in damages to patent-holding company VirnetX over its FaceTime and VPN patents, CNET reports. This latest lawsuit is a retrial of a 2012 award where Apple was ordered to pay $368.2 million; an appeals court dismissed that damage award against Apple and ordered a new trial for some of the infringement claims. VirnetX refiled the suit in January, covering these earlier infringement claims as well as infringements based on newer generations of iOS devices.
Apple has said that it plans to appeal the decision, with a spokesperson making the statement that “Our employees independently designed this technology over many years, and we received patents to protect this intellectual property.” The damage award is actually worth more than VirnetX, which is a small patent-holding company that doesn’t actually make any products of its own.
