Apple loses $24 million battle over decades-old pager patents

Mobile tech has come a long way since the days of pagers - though apparently not that long, at least where the iPhone is concerned.

A Texas jury has ruled that the iPhone and other Apple products infringe on no less than six pager-related patents held by a company called Mobile Telecommunications Technologies. The patents relate to SkyTel pagers and date back to the '90s.

As a result Apple's been ordered to pay out $23.6 million to the Texas company - and that's only about one tenth of what it had been seeking from Apple. Mobile Telecommunications no longer makes pagers (obviously), but the company is now owned by United Wireless, which still uses the SkyTel network for communications among emergency first responders and doctors.

This is the second recent case to touch on Apple's alleged use of other companies' pager-related patents - though Apple won the first case, last month in California.

But the most amusing part of this is undoubtedly that Apple isn't Mobile Telecom's only target - jury selection for its case against Samsung, Apple's usual rival in court, begins next month.

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Via Bloomberg