Apple has come to the defence of the firm's army of app developers following patent claims launched by a company demanding a cut of app sales revenue.
Patent holder Lodsys fired a torrent of legal threats against individual iOS developers alleging infringement of a patent and demanding half a per cent of software sales despite Apple already being a licence holder.
The action against Apple's third party developers comes after the firm went after Brother, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Samsung Electronics earlier this month, alleging infringement of a 'Customer-Based Design Module' patent.
The patent relating to Apple is patent 7222078, purchased by Lodsys in 2003, describing 'systems for gathering information from units of a commodity across a network'.
Just ten days later Apple senior veep and legal councel Bruce Sewell wrote to Lodsys, saying that Apple app developers were covered by Apple's existing licence and urging Lodsys to "withdraw your outstanding threats to the App Makers and cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners."
Apple developers greeted the news with relief with PCalc developer James Thomson tweeting: 'Our long international nightmare is over.'
Advertisement
Related Stories
- The Apple iPhone 5 rumour mill May 25th 2012 at 2:50PM
- Developer fined £50,000 over fake Angry Birds app May 25th 2012 at 12:28PM
- Yahoo unveils innovative search software for Apple May 24th 2012 at 2:27PM
- Apple tells Siri complainers to get a different phone May 18th 2012 at 12:13PM
- iPhone 5 'bigger screen' rumours gather pace May 17th 2012 at 2:13PM
- Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4 released May 9th 2012 at 10:28PM
- iOS update fixes bugs and security flaws May 8th 2012 at 5:45AM
- Apple quietly intros new CPU to iPad 2 May 7th 2012 at 2:44AM
- Jury struggles for verdict in Oracle vs Google May 6th 2012 at 11:56PM
- Apple sells 35 million iPhones Apr 25th 2012 at 1:26AM
