Mass. man suing Apple over patent

A Massachusetts inventor is suing Apple Inc., saying the company is illegally using his caller identification technology in the popular iPhone.

The lawsuit, filed last Friday in US District Court in Boston, pits one of the world's leading technology companies against an independent inventor whose patent is already licensed by many of Apple's biggest competitors in the cellphone business.

Romek Figa of Hanover, a 1971 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, operates Abraham & Son, an electronics consulting business. During the 1980s, Figa teamed up with two other inventors on a personalized caller ID system.

With standard caller ID, the phone company relays the number of an incoming call, so the phone can display the number on a screen. Often this number means nothing to the person being called. But Figa's invention captures the number data and compares it to the electronic directory in the phone. If the incoming call number matches one that's already in the directory, the phone's screen shows the name of the caller as well the number.

Figa filed for a patent on the system in 1988 and it was granted in 1990.

Lawyer Lisa Tittemore of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP in Boston, the firm representing Figa, said many of the world's wireless phone makers have licensed the patent, including the three biggest - Motorola Inc., Samsung Group, and Nokia Corp. In addition, Figa sued Hong Kong electronics firm VTech Technology Ltd. over the patent in 2006; VTech and Figa reached a settlement last month.

"Apple was contacted about a license, but the parties were not able to agree on acceptable terms," Tittemore said. She said that Figa sent a letter to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in May 2007, about a month before the iPhone went on sale, to warn Jobs that the phone might violate the patent. "He informed Mr. Jobs that the iPhone very likely infringed, and he provided him with the patent number," said Tittemore.

In July, after he'd had a chance to use the iPhone, Figa concluded that the device did violate his patent. He offered Apple a chance to license the patent, but according to the lawsuit, "Apple has refused to take a license on the terms offered." Details of those terms have not been released.

Figa's lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages and asks that the damage amount be tripled because of Apple's "willful and deliberate" patent infringement.

"When a party is on notice of a patent and of the fact that there's infringement, and they continue to sell their product despite that, then it would be willful," said Tittemore.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company does not comment on pending legal matters.

Since the device was introduced last year amid massive publicity, Apple has sold about 4 million iPhones.

That's a strong performance for a new digital device, but it's still less than 1 percent of the 1.1 billion phones that were sold worldwide last year, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics Inc.