Apple and Visa’s attempt to get an invalidation of a lawsuit that challenges ownership of Apple Pay's core technologies has failed. A United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed Apple and Visa's appeal motion in a series of nonprecedential decisions, Law360 reported (a subscription is required to read the entire article).
In 2017 Universal Secure Registry, a Boston area “enabling technology” company, filed a complaint in United States District Court for the District of Delaware accusing Apple and Visa of infringing patents for electronic payments and identity authentication that paved the way for their mobile payment platforms
The suit seeks unspecified damages, but details the scope of the infringement, claiming, "since 2014 Apple's backend servers and Visa's payment processing network VisaNet, including Visa Token Service, have supported and processed transactions made using Apple Pay, including billions of Apple Pay transactions made in the United States."
According to the 2017 complaint, "Apple CEO Tim Cook stated at the iPhone 6 launch event in September 2014, '[p]ayments is a huge business. Every day between credit and debit we spend $12 billion. That's over $4 trillion a year and that's just in the United States. And this business is comprised of over 200 million transactions a day.''
USR purportedly holds a portfolio of 13 U.S. patents, plus additional patents pending and foreign patents authored by Weiss since 2000. The patents focus on software applications that secure and unimpeachable identity authentication can enable. These include payments, secure financial transactions, physical access and a replacement for Weiss's original SecurID token.