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

Apple, and the Apple Watch in particular, were hit with a legal one-two punch Friday. A jury found against the gadget titan, ordering it to pay $634 million to the health tech company Masimo, while on the same day the U.S. International Trade Commission announced it will reexamine whether it may want to impose an import ban on Apple Watches—also due to Masimo-related concerns.

It’s a huge dual victory for Masimo, whose multi-year legal war on Apple is sprawling and seemingly endless.

Apple ‌gave a statement to Yahoo Finance to that effect. A representative said “Over the past six years” Massimo has sued in multiple courts, and “asserted over 25 patents, the majority of which have been found to be invalid.” The verdict in this case concerns a patent, which Apple claims, “expired in 2022, and is specific to historic patient monitoring technology from decades ago.”

In 2024, Apple simply got rid of the blood oxygen monitor feature in order to get around the import ban. Yhe redesigned Apple Watches now under renewed ITC scrutiny are not the ones the jury just found infringed on Masimo’s patents.

For what it’s worth, Masimo’s technology is mainly designed for hospital and clinical use, but it claimed that Apple had copied its patented pulse-oximetry technology for use in the watch’s workout and heart-rate monitoring functions. Apple’s argument, that the patent expired in 2022, and that Apple Watches are consumer gadgets rather than hospital tools, evidently failed to convince the jury.

Meanwhile, a November 14 order from the ITC says the commission will now investigate whether an Apple workaround, put in place to circumvent a past import ban, also infringes on a patent from Masimo. “This proceeding does not afford an opportunity to relitigate other defenses that were, or should have been, litigated in the underlying violation investigation,” the order says.

There have been many twists and turns in the Apple-Masimo soap opera. The most entertaining one was probably when Apple won a countersuit against Masimo last year after Masimo created its own smart watch 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 suit was an injunction, not damages.

The whole complicated affair supposedly goes back to 2013, when Apple first sought a dialogue with Masimo about creating watches that monitor people’s pulses, and then ended up hiring two former Masimo executives and giving them salaries twice as high as what they had been making, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. It didn’t end there, according to Masimo engineer Joe Kiani, who said Apple poached much more for the Masimo staff than just two executives. “A lot of my people didn’t go, but they still got 20 of my people,” Kiani claimed.

A 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal details how Apple supposedly goes about seeking partnerships from smaller firms, including Masimo, and then engages in practices alleged to be tantamount to stealing ideas. “When Apple takes an interest in a company, it’s the kiss of death,” Masimo’s Kiani told the Journal.

Masimo sued in 2020 over the alleged stealing of trade secrets. That suit ended with a hung jury.