Apple will not get a third trial after receiving a $300 million verdict for patent infringement from Optis. Apple told the court last year it’s entitled to a new damages trial or Optis’ damages should be wiped.
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The seven-year long battle between Apple and Samsung over the Korean company infringing iPhone patents seemingly isn’t over yet.
Samsung has rejected the ‘final’ $533M damages awarded against it, and has now filed a motion to have the verdict thrown out …
Update: I was wrong – Apple won.
If you’re new to Change My View pieces, please check out our guide. What we’re looking for in the comments are respectful rational arguments either for or against the motion.
The Apple versus Samsung patent trial that began in 2011 returned to court last week. Closing arguments were made on Friday, and it’s now up to a jury to decide whether the damages awarded to Apple will be increased, decreased or remain unchanged.
My expectation is that Apple will lose the case – and I’ll define ‘lose’ in a moment – and that, actually, that would be the right result …
The trial to finalize the damages owed by Samsung to Apple for infringing five of its patents is set to rest on the meaning of a three-word phrase.
If the court accepts Apple’s definition, high damages are likely to be awarded. If it instead opts for Samsung’s definition, a far lower sum is likely to be awarded …
The latest round of the Apple versus Samsung patent trial kicked off yesterday with jury selection, and it proved so difficult to find unbiased jurors that choosing eight of them from the 74 candidates took the whole of the first day …
Yep, seven years after the billion-dollar patent trial between Apple and Samsung first began with a lawsuit by Apple, it still isn’t over yet.
The two companies are headed back to court today …
District Court Judge Lucy Koh has told Apple and Samsung that she would like to see a final end to the five-year legal battle over patent infringements by the Korean company.
I would prefer to not keep doing this until I retire. I would like this to be some closure for all of us.
She made the comment as she set a date for what is expected to be a five day hearing …
That years-long patent infringement battle between Apple and Samsung isn’t over yet. A judge has just ordered the two sides to return to court yet again.
Apple was originally awarded $1B after a court ruled that Samsung infringed its iPhone patents. That was later reduced to $339M, but Samsung argued that it was still too much and fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court – where it won. But it didn’t end there …
The never-ending court battle between Apple and Samsung over three iPhone design patents finally reached the Supreme Court yesterday. It had earlier been found that a total of 11 Samsung phones copied three design elements patented by Apple – including the famous ‘black rectangle with rounded corners.’ Lower courts ruled that Samsung should have to pay 100% of the profits earned from those phones, while Samsung thinks it should pay less.
Remarks by two of the Justices seem to indicate that they are leaning heavily towards Samsung’s side of the argument. Samsung’s position is that the patented features represent only part of the reason for purchase, and that they should accordingly have to hand over only part of the profits earned from them …
The endless patent battles between Apple and Samsung took an interesting turn this week when Apple claimed that the most recent court ruling violated the Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: the right to trial by jury.
Back in 2014, Apple was awarded $119.6M when Samsung was found to have violated three of the five patents in dispute. That award was overturned last month when an appeals court ruled that Samsung didn’t infringe one of the three patents, and declared the other two invalid.
The problem, explains Reuters, is that the appellate court didn’t just refer to the trial court record in reaching its conclusions, it also considered new evidence …
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 …
Almost five years after Samsung was found guilty of infringing Apple patents, and some four trials later, the two companies have agreed to settle out of court for $548M. Samsung says that if Apple submits an invoice for this amount by the weekend, it will be paid within ten days, reports FOSS Patents.
As you may recall, Apple was initially awarded $1B in damages, then $450M of it was overturned and replaced with $290M, for a new total of $930M. The U.S. appeals court later decided that was still too high, and a new trial was set to take place next year unless the parties could reach a settlement in the meantime. That settlement has now been reached, but there’s a catch …
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Apple has scored a belated additional victory against Samsung in its endless patent trial battle with the smartphone rival. Apple had originally asked the court for two remedies: financial compensation, and an injunction forbidding Samsung from continuing to sell devices which infringed its patents. The court said yes to the first, no to the second.
As the WSJ reports, a federal appeals court judge has ruled that the court should have also granted the injunction.
“Samsung’s infringement harmed Apple by causing lost market share and lost downstream sales and by forcing Apple to compete against its own patented invention,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said[…]
The appeals court [ruled that] a California trial court that previously denied Apple’s request “abused its discretion when it did not enjoin Samsung’s infringement” …
A rough date has been set for round five of the battle over Samsung’s infringements of Apple patents in five of its products. The Recorder reports that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has said that the revised damages will be determined by a jury trial in March or April 2016.
In case you need a refresher, the story so far is this. In round 1, the first jury trial, Apple was awarded $1B in damages. In round 2, Judge Koh vacated $450M of that award and ordered a retrial to determine a revised sum. Round 3 was that jury trial, with Apple awarded a lower sum of $290M – making a revised total of $930M. In round 4, the US appeals court ruled that while Samsung did indeed copy iOS features, it should not have been penalised for copying the general look of the iPhone, and therefore the damages should be reduced. The new trial, to revise those damages, will be round 5.
Unless, that is, the Supreme Court intervenes …
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In the latest news in the patent case that feels like it will never end, a number of tech giants have taken Samsung’s side in its appeal against the damages it was ordered to pay for infringing Apple’s patents.
It’s almost three years since Apple was awarded $1B in damages after a jury found that Samsung infringed five of its patents. $450M of that award was later vacated and a retrial ordered to determine a revised sum, with Apple awarded a lower sum of $290M – for a revised total of $930M. The US appeals court later ruled that while Samsung did indeed copy iOS features, it should not have been penalised for copying the general look of the iPhone. The court now needs to once again revise the amount awarded.
The amount awarded in part reflected the profits Samsung was deemed to have made by infringing the patents, and it is this aspect that Google, Facebook, Dell, HP, eBay and other tech companies say is unreasonable …
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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 …
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Apple has been cleared of infringing five wireless patents originally held by Nokia in its iPhones and iPads. The patents were later acquired by a subsidiary of Conversant Intellectual Property Management Inc, which sued Apple for $100M by calculating a per-device license fee. Apple argued that even if it had infringed the patents, which it denied, a fair license fee would be less than $1M.
Reuters reports that a federal jury in Texas took five hours to deliberate yesterday before finding in favor of Apple.
Had Conversant won, it’s possible that the majority of the revenue would have been paid to Microsoft and Nokia. In a complicated chain, Conversant obtained the patents when it acquired a company called Core Wireless, which had in turn bought them from Nokia–which had licensed them to Microsoft.
In its purchase of Core Wireless, Conversant agreed to return two-thirds of any revenue from licensing and litigating the patents back to Microsoft and Nokia, according to the documents. A Microsoft representative on Monday night could not confirm whether that agreement was still in force.
Update: Microsoft has since informed me that “Microsoft no longer has a financial stake in Core Wireless.”
Apple holds the unenviable record of having been sued by more patent trolls than any other company. It has a mixed record of success in these cases, Apple saying last year that it usually won on the merits of the cases it defended, but chose to settle some “for business purposes.”
Apple last month lost a case brought by Smartflash, and was ordered to pay over half a billion dollars in damages. Apple is appealing the award, while Smartflash is extending the proceedings to devices made since the lawsuit was originally filed.
In a separate ongoing patent dispute with Ericsson, the ITC has been asked to block the import of iPhones into the country.
The latest court battle between Apple and Samsung begins today, with Samsung appealing against the $930M it was ordered to pay Apple for patent infringement in the first trial between the two companies. Samsung is arguing that the amount awarded was “excessive and unwarranted.”
It’s of course not the first time that the sum awarded has been disputed. Apple was initially awarded $1B in damages, with $450M of that later cut and a retrial required 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 …
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Steve Jobs famously declared back in 2010 that Android was a stolen product, and he was willing to “go thermonuclear war” in order to “destroy” it.
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Back in April, I suggested three reasons it might be time for Apple to settle its Android disputes and move on. The relatively small damages award in the most recent case (and which now looks set to be further reduced) provided a fourth reason not long after I wrote that piece. But I think the case today is even more compelling …
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In a new twist to the second Apple vs Samsung patent trial, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected the specific part of Apple’s auto-correct patent that Samsung was said to have infringed, reports FOSS Patents. This effectively means that Samsung was ruled to have infringed a patent that is no longer valid.
The trial found that Samsung infringed three of the five patents Apple claimed, including a specific element of its auto-correct patent which described a particular method of offering corrections or completions. Samsung had unsuccessfully argued at trial that this approach had been used by others before Apple, and therefore could not be patented. The court rejected this argument, but the USPTO has now agreed with Samsung …
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Samsung, together with its lawyers, will have to fork out a little more cash following its loss in its second patent battle with Apple. A court has fined lawyers Quinn Emanuel and Samsung a total of $2M for misusing confidential details of a patent deal struck between Apple and Nokia.
The documents were supplied by Apple to Samsung’s lawyers purely so that it could see that Apple was telling the truth about its patent deals with other companies. The documents were marked “for attorney’s eyes only” and were not to be revealed to Samsung executives …
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While FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller may be confident of Apple and Samsung reaching an early settlement on their patent disputes, a court-mandated update on the talks seems to tell a different story, with each side explaining why talks were not going well, reports The Verge.
For Apple, that includes statements made by Samsung’s lead attorney John Quinn, who referred to Apple as a “jihadist” and called the protracted trial “Apple’s Vietnam” in a pair of interviews …
Korea Times (via Fortune) is reporting that Apple and Samsung are in talks designed to settle all future patent disputes out of court. FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller believes that a settlement will be reached “very soon.”
“Things should come to an end during the summer. Apple doesn’t have an endgame strategy. Its agreement with Google shows that its management is looking for a face-saving exit strategy from Steve Jobs’ thermonuclear ambitions,” Mueller said …
Photo: technobuffalo.com
The foreman of the jury that awarded Apple just 5.5 percent of the $2.2B it claimed Samsung owed for patent infringements said yesterday that Apple should sue Google rather than handset manufacturers, reports the WSJ.
If you really feel that Google is the cause behind this, as I think everybody has observed, then don’t beat around the bush,” said Tom Dunham, whose job at IBM was to oversee developers expected to file patents. “Let the courts decide. But a more direct approach may be something to think about” …
