Apple Paying $8 Million To Personal Audio LLC In iPod Playlist Suit

Ouch. We know Apple has tons and tons of spare cash on hand, but no one's really interested in handing over $8 million of it for no good reason. This weekend, the Cupertino, CA-based company was asked to pay Personal Audio LLC a whopping $8 million after a federal jury in Taxes determined that they had infringed patents for downloadable playlists. Personal Audio is a company you've probably never heard of before, but they could end up making more news shortly. In the suit, which was originally filed in an area of Texas where patent trolls generally win cases, Coby, Sirius XM and others were named on top of just Apple.

The suit, when filed, asked for $84 million in damages; Apple's obviously not paying up anywhere near that, but they aren't getting away scott-free. According to a Bloomberg report on the matters, the inventions cover "an audio player that can receive navigable playlists and can skip forward or backward through the downloaded list." Apple obviously stated that they weren't actually using those inventions, but the courts saw it differently. But considering that the iPod along generated $8.3 billion for Apple last year, we guess that a oaltry $8m fine isn't too damaging.