Despite the $548M settlement reached earlier this month, Samsung has now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal of its patent battle with Apple, reports the WSJ. The company is arguing that lower courts misapplied the law concerning Apple’s design patents.
Specifically, Samsung is asking the court to review rulings concerning “design patents” that cover the look and feel of a product. At trial, Apple convinced the jury that basic design elements of certain Samsung smartphones—essentially a rectangle with rounded corners and a touch-screen grid made up of smaller icons—borrowed too closely from Apple’s iPhone design.
Samsung argues that lower courts made two mistakes …
First, suggests the company’s lawyers, the judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the difference between ‘functional’ and ‘ornamental’ features. Samsung said that its smartphones had to adopt the same general form factor as the iPhone in order to perform the function of a smartphone.
“The jury could look at Apple’s patented designs, look at Samsung’s phones, see that both have rectangular shapes, rounded corners, flat screens and colorful icon grids, and decide, voilà, that there must be design-patent infringement—even though those shared features are…functional, not ornamental,” wrote Samsung’s lawyers, in the brief.
Second, the company says that the damages awarded were too high.
In Samsung’s eyes, according to Monday’s court filing, it was wrongly ordered to pay Apple all of its profit from infringing profits. Samsung says the 1887 law pertaining to design patents is outdated and too punitive for modern products such as a smartphone, which Samsung says contains about 250,000 design and utility patents.
The company likened the case to a car company being ordered to hand over all its profits on a car if the company was found to have copied a patented cupholder.
The U.S. Supreme Court will need to decide whether or not to hear the case. CNET quotes Stanford Law School intellectual property law professor Mark Lemley as stating that asking the court to take on a case “is always an uphill battle, but this is a very high-profile case.” The court may be influenced by the fact that Google, Facebook and others have sided with Samsung, though Apple has said that Google is not a disinterested party.
If the Supreme Court does agree to hear the case, it will be rather busy with Apple-related cases: Apple has asked it to hear the final appeal of the ebook trial. Apple recently got the backing of authors and booksellers, who argue that Amazon rather than Apple should have been investigated.
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Without taking any “sides” in this on-going court battle / fiasco – it points up a glaring need in the US of A and that’s we need to institute patent law reform. Do I ever think we’ll ever see it – NO! Why: Because the Lawyers write the laws / rules and who profits from all the FUD — Why, the lawyers of course!
Yet another shortsighted decision that was made many, many years ago. And to rewrite these laws would resuolt in a loss of income for the sharks . . . . umm, lawyers!
YMMV!
I agree on this… reform is definitely overdue. However, in the meantime……..current laws and patent rules apply and Same-Song is just trying to soften the blow.
And, on a purely personal side – I do think that Samsung is / are a bunch of copy cats who have no clear vision except steal from whomever is a market leader. Again – IMHO – Samsung are a bunch of bottom feeders who are just looking to steal the low hanging fruit without doing any of the necessary work research outside of buying a competitors product and ripping it off.
Again – YMMV!
Your (repeated) use of “YMMV” is completely jejune and ignorant to the actual use. You definitely need to stop, so as not to embarrass yourself even further.
So let’s see… Same-Song says that court should dismiss “design” patents for Apple because it was ordered to pay ALL of it’s profits of the ‘copied’ design patents but a phone includes 250000 DESIGN and utility patents… does this sound like flip flop logic? Dismiss design patents because we use 250000 of them….
Samsung is whole business model is predicated on copying. I hope this backfires on them.
The issue isn’t damages but the the way they’re determined. Had they been utility patents infringed then there would have been an apportionment of the profits Samsung saw from the US device sales. Fair enough. Because they were design patents tho the Federal Court said they have no choice but to award 100% of the profits. Every penny.
So take off the Apple or Samsung fan glasses and you should clearly see the danger if SCOTUS doesn’t accept the case. The Fed decision will stand and become case law for future design patent cases. In the extreme a company, even Apple, found to infringe on the look of a single icon on a single screen on an iPhone could make that patent holder the richest company in the world when 100% of Apple’s iPhone profits are awarded in damages. According to this precedent-setting interpretation of the law that’s the only cure, all or nothing. There’s no in-between in the Fed Court opinion. You can be certain there’s dozens of NPE’s scouring design patents for that nugget of gold to use against wealthy techs if the opinion stands. Design patents will potentially become far more valuable and powerful than any utility patents.
While Samsung may certainly deserve whatever punishment they get this particular case goes far beyond them. When the shoe drops on “the other side” you may understand it better if you don’t already.
So if Apple copies… then they’ll be found guilty and pay … end of the story.
5 years i’ve been reading about this saga… Same-Song has been copying Apple and other companies shamelessly just because it is in their DNA and they can litigate the issue for years until it becomes irrelevant. This part of the patent law is also very broken.
They were found guilty of copying… they were found liable to pay sums… jurors decided (at the time) that 1+ Billion were due.
Through 5 years of litigation, they were never able to get over the fact that they copied…and still do… and on top of that they aren’t even making a great business at it judging by the rounds of layoffs and head attrition they have done over the years… All they did was lower the damages to 550M$ and give 500M$ to their lawyers…
It’s not a case of Apple fandom… but a case of pure disgust for Same-Song. They would have saved face by admitting they were wrong and paying up and move on….. Apple made mistakes that they HAD to apologize (remember the maps fiasco?)… they apologized to their user base… people were pissed but in the end were ok to forgive…. but not forget.
Same-Song just doesn’t get user intelligence and loyalty… they just want to be the other Apple desperately and grab at everything they can to try and copy it… unfortunately..they only are a pale imitation.
So is the lawyer saying that no smartphones before the iPhone worked?
If I were Ford I would sue Toyota for using 4 wheels and a metal box filled with seats when designing cars. Whirlpool should sue LG for designing refrigerators that have doors, made of different metals including stainless steel, and stand upright.
Really don’t understand why this point is not brought up more often. Everyone looks at this one patent case in a vacuum not understanding that these patents are unbelievably vague and if given in other industries nothing could be made or sold.
To your point, take the brand badges off all the appliances in Lowes and tell me which one is a Whirlpool. The phone icon being a green phone, and the patent showing a rectangular screen in a matching frame with round corners should not be grounds for a patent just like a dishwasher with a door on the front. This should be pissing everyone but Apple off.
Stranger still is that consumers side with the companies who hold these patents when, from the consumer side, you are better off without them. I am a product engineer and let me tell you my company tries to patent every idea that is blurted out in the conference room and they are not doing it to benefit the end users. If Samsung makes a carbon copy of an iPhone, then the next iPhone will be better to stay ahead, so the Apple fans win. Now maybe some percentage of users are also stock holders and get mad about the sunk RnD costs and that would be valid, but average Joe user with any product under the sun should not be losing sleep because their competitors are mirroring their stuff.
I am open to being corrected on this, but to me it’s a very strange gripe for people to hold.