In a lawsuit, the
California Institute of Technology (CalTech) was able to prevail against the corporations Apple and Broadcom, which were sentenced by a federal court in Los Angeles to a total of 1.1 billion US dollars in damages. Apple accounts for $837.8 million of this, Broadcom for $270.2 million. The lawsuit, which was already filed in 2016, was concerned with whether the two companies had used university research technologies in commercial products without the university’s approval. The amount of damages was calculated on the basis of license fees, which would have been 26 cents per iPhone in the case of Broadcom and $1.40 in the case of Apple.
Specifically, this was a WLAN component developed by CalTech, then integrated into WLAN chips by Broadcom and finally installed by Apple in millions of iPhones. The stolen technology, which helps to improve data transmission, was already protected by the university at that time through a series of...
