The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has partially reversed the $930M verdict Apple won against Samsung in the long-running iPhone patent case, reports Reuters.
Apple was originally awarded $1B in damages, before $450M of that was vacated and a retrial ordered to determine a revised sum. The retrial awarded Apple $290M instead for that element of the case, giving Apple a revised total award of $930M.
Samsung appealed, and has today been partially successful, making it a near-certainty that the $930M award will be reduced by up to $382M …
The appeals court held that Samsung did indeed infringe Apple’s patents, but did not violate Apple’s “trade dress,” a technical legal term meaning the way that a product is presented. In simple terms, violating the patents was actionable, but making a phone that had the same general appearance as the iPhone was not.
$382M of the $930M awarded by the jury was for “trade dress dilution.” The court has said that the issue of trade dress must now be reconsidered by a lower court. That court might choose to reduce this part of the award, or to reject it altogether, in the worst case reducing Apple’s total award to $548M.
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IMO, the trade dress is more actionable and egregious than any purported patent violations in the OS/apps in this case. But at this point it’s obvious that Apple has been outcompeting Samsung and if it weren’t for Samsung’s prowess in chip fabrication, they’d be on the curb as far as Apple is concerned.
I’m not sure how many more years of significance Samsung has left, but they’ll fall to the wayside sooner rather than later, with the likes of Xiaomi only accelerating their fate.