Apple requests ruling in its favor over Samsung press leak, judge prohibits 2001: A Space Odyssey references

At the beginning of the week, we reported Samsung leaked slides to the press that Judge Koh excluded as evidence in the Samsung-Apple trial currently underway. Judge Koh was not impressed with the move, despite much of the information in the slides being public knowledge, and today we get an update from FossPatents on Apple’s response to the situation. According to the report, Apple filed a letter with the courts today claiming fines would not be a severe enough punishment for Samsung and it requested a judgment in its favor:

“The proper remedy for Samsung’s misconduct is judgment that Apple’s asserted phone design patents are valid and infringed. Through its extraordinary actions yesterday, Samsung sought to sway the jury on the design patent issues, and the proper remedy is to enter judgment against Samsung on those same patents. It would be, to be sure, a significant sanction. But serious misconduct can only be cured through a serious sanction—and here, Samsung’s continuing and escalating misconduct merits a severe penalty that will establish that Samsung is not above the law.”

Apple also outlined an alternative set of sanctions, requesting “the Court should (i) instruct the jury that Samsung engaged in serious misconduct and that, as a result, the Court has made a finding that Samsung copied the asserted designs and features from Apple products; and (ii) preclude Samsung from further mentioning or proffering any evidence regarding the ‘Sony design exercise’ for any purpose.” FossPatents said Apple’s requests could mean big problems for Samsung moving forward:

Even if the court found that the appropriate sanction is a jury instruction that falls short of Apple’s second (softer) proposal, Samsung would still have a major problem. Apple has already won one adverse inference jury instruction. The question is how trusthworthy Samsung is going to appear to the jury if another sanction becomes known to it… Apple suspects that Samsung’s objective is a “mistrial”, but Apple now wants this trial to happen, and wants to get decisions.

FossPatents also reported today that Judge Koh provided Samsung and Apple with a table including key pieces of evidence admissible in the trial. As noted in the report, prior art referenced from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey movie and the TV series “The Tomorrow People” is prohibited:

“For example, Samsung referenced clips from ‘Space Odyssey’ and ‘Tomorrow People’ in its opposition to the preliminary injunction in a general discussion of the background of the field. Samsung did not, however, argue that these references supported an invalidity or non-infringement theory. That Samsung changed tack after the close of fact discovery to include these references in their invalidity theories likely prejudiced Apple, who was not made aware during the preliminary injunction proceedings that Samsung intended to rely on these two prior art references for invalidity.

We will bring you updates on the trial as it continues.