Apple currently is involved in a number of court battles but this week the company was on the losing end of one of them. According to Bloomberg, a federal jury is awarding $8 million to another company that claims Apple violated its patents based on downloadable playlists. The company is Texas based Personal Audio LLC, a patent licensing company. It filed a lawsuits against Apple in 2009. It claimed Apple violated two of its patents that were based on "an audio player that can receive navigable playlists and can skip forward or backward through the downloaded list."
While Apple claimed that it was not using Personal Audio's patents, a federal jury in Texas disagreed and awarded the $8 million to Personal Audio. The company had originally asked for $84 million. There's no word if Apple will try to appeal the jury's decision. There's also no word if Personal Audio might try to file lawsuits against other companies that offer media players with similar features.
Apple's court battles this week included being on the losing end of a judge's decision not to put a injunction against Amazon.com for its use of the "Appstore" name for Amazon's Android download store. On Friday, Apple filed a cease and desist order against another company, GetJar, for using the term "app store" for its long running software download service. GetJar has already proclaimed it has used the term "app store" for some time to describe its business and plans to fight Apple over the term.
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