Washington: A German court has reportedly dismissed the 2 billion dollar lawsuit filed against Apple for allegedly infringing on a European patent essential to 3G and LTE devices.
The German company, IPCom, had sought the said damages by arguing that it owned the patents.
According to The Verge, Germany`s Mannheim regional court dismissed the case, having also dismissed a similar case between IPCom and HTC.
The report said that the rulings were a significant setback for IPCom, a company that owns 1,200 patents related to mobile technologies.
Apple and a group of other major companies, including Nokia, HTC, and Vodafone, previously challenged the patent`s validity, but the European Patent Office ultimately held up a narrower version of it last month.
The patent covers a technology that allows a device to receive priority on a network in the event of an emergency, even if the network is congested.
IPCom`s primary business is licensing these mobile communication patents to manufactures in the industry, and like many other of its patents, this one too had been acquired from another company.