Apple Suffers 2 Defeats in One Day Amid Patent War with Masimo

Apple, and the Apple Watch in particular, was hit with one legal punch on Friday. A jury found against the hardware giant, ordering it to pay $634 million to health technology company Masimo, while the US International Trade Commission announced on the same day that it would reconsider whether it might want to impose a ban on importing Apple Watches – also over concerns about Masimo.

It’s a major double victory for Masimo, whose multi-year legal war with Apple has become sprawling and seemingly endless.

Apple provided a statement to Yahoo finance to this effect. “Over the past six years,” Massimo has sued in multiple courts and “asserted more than 25 patents, most of which were found to be invalid,” a representative said. The ruling in this case concerns a patent that Apple claims “expired in 2022, relating to historical patient monitoring technology from decades ago.”

In 2024, Apple simply got rid of the blood oxygen monitoring feature in order to get around the import ban. The redesigned Apple Watches that are now under renewed scrutiny by the ITC are not the ones that a jury just found to be infringing Masimo’s patents.

However, Masimo’s technology is primarily designed for hospital and clinical use, but it claims Apple has copied its patented pulse oximetry technology for use in the watch’s exercise and heart rate monitoring functions. Apple’s argument, that the patent expired in 2022 and that Apple Watches are consumer gadgets, not hospital tools, clearly failed to convince the jury.

Meanwhile, an ITC order issued on November 14 states that the panel will now investigate whether Apple’s workaround, put in place to circumvent the previous import ban, also infringes a Masimo patent. “This action does not provide an opportunity to review other defenses that were or should have been raised in the investigation of the underlying violation,” the order says.

There were many twists and turns in the Apple-Masimo TV series. Perhaps most amusing was when Apple won a countersuit against Masimo last year after Masimo created its own smartwatch product, and Apple was awarded $250 in damages. Apple’s claim was that Masimo was infringing on its design patents, and representatives said the ultimate goal of the lawsuit was an injunction, not damages.

The whole complicated case supposedly dates back to 2013, when Apple first sought dialogue with Masimo about creating watches that monitored people’s pulses, and then ended up hiring two former Masimo executives and giving them salaries double what they were earning, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. It didn’t end there, according to Joe Kiani, a Masimo engineer, who said Apple poached much more for Masimo employees than just two executives. Kayani claimed that “many of my people have not gone, but they still have twenty of my people.”

A 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal details how Apple allegedly sought partnerships from small companies, including Masimo, and then engaged in practices that allegedly amounted to idea theft. “When Apple takes an interest in a company, it’s the kiss of death,” Masimo’s Kiani told the newspaper.

Massimo was sued in 2020 for theft of trade secrets. That lawsuit ended in a hung jury.