What began as a lawsuit over 2 years ago, is now turning into a full-blown nightmare for Apple that has even gotten the president involved.

In 2021, medical device maker Masimo sued the world's most-valuable company for patent infringement. As Engadget reported, Masimo claimed the blood oxygen monitor in Apple's Series 6 watch infringed on five of its pulse oximeter patents. A judge with the US International Trade Court agreed—on one of the infringement claims, but not the other four.

"Today's decision should help restore fairness in the market," Masimo CEO Joe Kiani said at the time. "Apple has similarly infringed on other companies' technologies, and we believe today's ruling exposes Apple as a company that takes other companies' innovations and repackages them."

Apple argued that it was Masimo that infringed on its patents, but in October of this year, the US Federal Court of Appeals upheld the initial ruling and put a ban on sales of all Apple Watch models that include the blood oxygen monitor technology, which includes Apple's Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches. The tech giant made an immediate appeal to the US Trade Delegation, which "decided not to reverse the ban following careful consultations," says CNBC. Apple also filed an emergency request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that stayed the ban on Wednesday morning through January 10th awaiting response from the ITC.

In a separate filing on Tuesday, Masimo said that Apple's request for an interim should be denied because "there is no emergency." As the LA Times notes, Masimo claims "Apple misleads the Court as to the status quo …Apple fails to inform the Court that it has already stopped sales of the infringing Apple Watches that are the subject of the challenged ITC orders.”

For fiscal year 2023, Apple's wearables business generated about $40 billion in sales.

LATE-NIGHT EMAIL

According to Bloomberg, this case begins with an email sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook at 1am. “I strongly believe that we can develop the new wave of technology that will make Apple the No. 1 brand in the medical, fitness and wellness market," Marcelo Lamego wrote in the email. Lamego was CTO of Cercacor Laboratories, Masimo's sister company, but within hours of the email, he was being poached by Apple. “They didn’t have to steal our people — we could have worked with them,” Masimo CEO Joe Kiani told Bloomberg. “These guys have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and — instead of being embarrassed and doing the right thing — they’re blaming everybody and fighting everybody.”

THE VERDICT:

Apple vs Masimo is definitely a case of David vs Goliath, yet it was only this month that Google lost an antitrust case to Epic Games. And while that was a very different type of case, Silicon Valley is waking up to the fact that it is no longer invincible. Then again, it's hard to image a $3 trillion company flinching over a threat to a fraction of its revenue.