Diamond Fortress has prevailed in a Delaware court over a case involving a breach of agreement for unmet payments from a cryptocurrency under the Everest umbrella. Apple is sued, meanwhile, by a company alleging the tech giant infringed on its patent for facial expression recognition technology for messaging system security that is used in Apple’s Memoji app.
Judge awards Diamond Fortress and CEO for crypto consulting
A judge in the Superior Court of Delaware has awarded Diamond Fortress Technologies and its CEO Charles Hatcher II for a total of approximately $25 million in damages due to a breach of agreement over cryptocurrency consulting.
An opinion and order (courtesy Law360) states that Hatcher was hired by blockchain, cryptocurrency, and biometric identity company EverID to consult on the purchase, integration, and management of Diamond Fortress’ ONYX fingerprint identification software development kit for smartphones. In 2017, both parties agreed to have Diamond Fortress grant EverID an exclusive license to ONYX for digital and blockchain wallets that closed off Diamond Fortress’s pursuits in blockchain. They also agreed to compensate Diamond Fortress and Hatcher with EverID’s tokens upon its initial coin offering (ICO).
In February 2021, EverID’s ICO occurred, but was not met with partial payments to Hatcher and Diamond Fortress, and EverID went radio silent when contacted by the plaintiffs. The breach of contract created a “novel circumstance” according to Judge Paul R. Wallace, as no Delaware court had yet wrestled with the question of calculating the judgment in cryptocurrency.
EverID, Inc. is the legal name of the Everest platform, which merges the company’s portfolio of decentralized solutions like EverChain, EverWallet, and CRDT. Everest found a notable client in the form of Oracle in July 2021, to apply its blockchain and biometrics capabilities to onboarding banking customers.
The judge concluded that the damages should be awarded on the peak price of EverID’s tokens at $2.01, and awarded Diamond Fortress $20.1 million and Hatcher $5.03 million.
Telos Corporation acquired Diamond Fortress Technologies last August.
Apple sued for patent infringement on facial expression recognition
Apple was served a lawsuit for allegedly infringing on a facial expression recognition patent for messaging systems that the plaintiff claims is used in the Memoji feature in iMessage that imitates the personality and mood of the user with an emoji.
In a filing with the United States District Court Eastern District of Missouri, FaceToFace Biometrics alleges that its patent ‘Expression recognition in messaging systems’ dated to June 22, 2021, was infringed by Apple by continuing to sell iPhones and iPads in the U.S. that include iMessage with the Memoji feature. FaceToFace demands Apple to “pay damages adequate to compensate FaceToFace for Defendant’s infringement of the ‘623 Patent” from the sale of the iPhone X to iPhone 13 Pro Max and the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro, along with other infringing sales and attorney fees.
Apple’s Memoji is a feature that takes the user’s face acquired from a selfie or video sample to create a customizable emoticon that borrows features from their facial expression and can be sent through iMessage and Facetime.
In the patent listing for FaceToFace, the company details a security system that is said to protect and filter messages in a mobile messaging system with biometrics. The patent would recognize facial expressions that analyzes the user’s mood and expressions to determine whether it would present another message from the sender, customize advertisements, automatically generate an emoji correspondent to the user’s emotion, and function as gesture control.
Patently Apple describes FaceToFace as a “patent assertion entity,” or a patent troll.
Article Topics
Apple | biometrics | cryptocurrency | Diamond Fortress Technologies | Everest | face biometrics | FaceToFace | lawsuits | mobile biometrics | patents
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