By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

A federal jury in Texas has ordered Apple to pay $532.9 million to patent licensing firm Smartflash over three patents relating to its iTunes music software.

Smartflash contended that Apple infringed on three patents and was seeking a total of $852 million in damages.

Apple claimed that the patents were worth $4.5 million at most.

The verdict was released late Tuesday after the jury deliberated for eight hours, with Smartflash announcing the decision Wednesday.

The jury concluded that Apple not only infringed on Smartflash’s patents, but did so knowingly.

Texas-based Smartflash originally sued Apple in May 2013, claiming Apple’s iTunes software infringed on patents relating to how users accessed, downloaded and stored music, games and video.  

Apple has called Smartflash a “patent troll” that takes advantage of the American patenting system.

“Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no U.S. presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented,” Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement following the verdict. “We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system.”

Apple has consistently claimed that Smartflash’s patents were already invalid because other earlier technology patents covered the same areas. The California company tried to convince a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, but failed.

Smartflash said that 15 years ago, a co-inventor of some of its patents met with Augustin Farrugia, who was an executive at European mobile phone SIM card manufacturer Gemalto at the time. Farrugia is now a high-ranking employee at Apple.

Apple vowed to appeal the ruling.

Smartflash has other patent infringement cases currently against tech giants Samsung and Google.