SEATTLE — Apple Inc. is challenging a federal jury’s order that it pay $625.5 million in damages for violating a small technology company’s patents.
If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent lawsuit.
Last Friday, the jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter to commercialize his ideas.
The patents cover characteristic features on Apple’s Macintosh computers, iPods and iPhones. The technologies include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content as if through a stack of cards; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives.
Over the weekend, Apple asked the U.S. District Court to hold off on imposing the jury award, saying there were still issues that needed to be addressed. Among other things, Apple objects to the way the damages were calculated.
