Apple CEO Tim Cook to testify in court over Qualcomm lawsuit

Apple and Qualcomm’s messy legal battles are heating up as Apple CEO Tim Cook prepares to give a deposition on June 27th, 2018.

Cook will testify in regards to a Qualcomm lawsuit that accuses the Cupertino-based tech giant of lying to regulators in order to start investigations of Qualcomm following complaints over chip royalties.

The full legal document can be viewed below.

The two tech giants have been at war with one another for over a year now.

In January 2017, Apple filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Qualcomm, stating the company was “charging royalties for technologies they have nothing to do with.”

Apple further argued that Qualcomm was charging “at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined.”

As a result, Apple said it would withhold making any royalty payments to Qualcomm until the dispute was resolved.

In response, Qualcomm later sued Apple contract manufacturers — who are charged by Qualcomm on behalf of Apple — for failing to pay royalties on licensed agreements. “Apple is attempting to inflict severe, immediate, and permanent harm on Qualcomm to force Qualcomm to agree to Apple’s unreasonable demand for a below-market direct license,” Qualcomm wrote in a court filing.

At one point, a May 2017 report suggested Qualcomm was attempting to get the International Trade Commission to ban the iPhone — which is manufactured in Asia — from entering the U.S., although nothing came out of these alleged plans.

Qualcomm later claimed that Apple was in violation of six of its own battery patents, to which Apple responded by alleging that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset was infringing on eight battery life patents.

Specifically, Apple singled out the Snapdragon 800 and 820 as part of the infringements, chips that are a few generations behind Qualcomm’s current 835 flagship but are still used for in-market devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 and BlackBerry DTEK60.

Cook’s court appearance seems to be the first major step forward in resolving the long-running legal disputes.

Via: Mashable