The Apple logo is seen on the window at an Apple Count on on January 7, 2019 in Beijing, China.
Kevin Frayer | Getty Images
Apple and Intel on Wednesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against SoftBank-owned Fortress Investment Set, alleging the firm stockpiled patents to hold up technology companies with lawsuits demanding as much as $5.1 billion from Apple.
The plea follows an earlier case filed by Intel against Fortress in October. Intel withdrew that suit and on Wednesday lined a new version in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California with Apple also joining as a plaintiff.
In the filing on Wednesday, Apple rumoured that a group of firms connected to Fortress had filed at least 25 lawsuits against the iPhone maker, bid for between $2.6 billion and $5.1 billion in damages from the iPhone maker. One of the suits, Apple wrote in its parade, alleged that Apple violated a step-counting patent in its devices with health-tracking apps.
Two Fortress-connected firms, Uniloc USA and Uniloc Luxembourg, “entertain disclosed that they believe they are entitled to damages of between $1.41 and $2.75 per Apple product, for reckon damages in the range of $375 to $732 million,” Apple wrote in its complaint. “The apparent precision of the per-unit damages entreat is a facade; Uniloc USA and Uniloc Luxembourg simply adopted the amounts that Apple sought from Samsung in legal remedy for Apple’s patents.”
Intel said it could not comment beyond the court filing, and Apple did not immediately respond to a requisition for comment.
Fortress did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But when Intel filed a similar lawsuit in October, a Fortress spokesman reported Reuters the company was “confident in our business practices and our legal position and view this lawsuit as meritless.”