The bitter battle between Apple
and Samsung over smartphone patents that had seemed decided by a $1.05bn (£698m) award in the US courts last August is not
quite over yet.
Judge Lucy Koh late on Friday knocked $450m
off the $1.05bn award, and ordered a new jury trial to decide how much – if any
– damages Samsung should pay for infringements by 14 handsets and tablets from
the original case.
Her decision does not overrule the jury's
decision in the original trial; the new jury will only decide the size of
damages to be paid over 14 other products that were found to infringe Apple's
patents on design or use, or both. That is almost certain to up the damages
from the new level Koh suggested – though it's unclear whether it would raise
it to the same level as before, or more, or less.
Apple will also be entitled to interest on
the total damages at the US Treasury bill rate (of just 0.16%) for the period
between the verdict and the final judgement, and supplemental damages based on
sales of infringing Samsung devices since the verdict. Samsung says only three
of the devices from the trial are still on sale.
In the original trial, the jury decided that
some Samsung products had copied the appearance of Apple's iPhone
3GS, and also infringed a "rubber-banding" patent when trying to
scroll past the top of an onscreen list, and the "tap to zoom"
function to enlarge text on screen with a double tap of the finger. Though some
– including Samsung – complained that the decision was hasty, reached after
just three days' deliberation, and contentious, Koh declined to overturn it.
Koh made the order following demands from both Apple and Samsung
for, respectively, higher and lower damages.
Koh urged Apple and Samsung not to go to a
second trial, but instead to find a negotiated settlement – a direction that
Florian Müller, an independent patents analyst, thinks the two will eventually
take. "The second damages trial is unlikely to take place, because in the
meantime there will be appeals of what's [already] been decided so far, and at
some point there will be a settlement," he told the Guardian.
The case has played out for almost two years
against a background in which the two companies have had an increasingly
strained relationship, even while they have both come to dominate the
smartphone sector.
Samsung used to be Apple's biggest supplier
for phone parts, and Apple its largest customer. But in 2010, Steve Jobs, then
Apple's chief, vowed to go to "thermonuclear war" over what he saw as
copying of iPhone features by Android phones. HTC was the first to be sued over
Android by Apple, but Samsung quickly became a bigger target, with the two
contesting court cases in multiple countries, including the UK, Germany,
France, Japan, South Korea and Australia.
The US case, filed in April 2011, was the
biggest, and the award by the jury last August seemed to mark a breakpoint in
the smartphone patent wars. But Samsung meanwhile became the
largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and the second most profitable
behind Apple. Together, the two companies produce around half of all the smartphones
shipped worldwide.
Koh upheld complaints of inconsistencies, pointed
out by Samsung's lawyers, in the way the original jury calculated the damages
payable by the South Korean electronics giant. She said the original jury
failed to provide the royalty rate that it applied in order to work out the
amounts that it awarded – and that this made it impossible to comply with
Apple's request for supplemental damages relating to Samsung's sales after the
case.
She also said that it wasn't clear when Apple
had first notified Samsung of some alleged patent infringements – which meant
that the starting date for calculating damages was unclear.
The titanic courtroom battle lasted three
weeks, and saw the jury decide that Apple's claims were mainly correct –
although they disagreed that Samsung's tablets copied the appearance of the iPad.
Samsung counterclaimed in the case that Apple infringed five of its patents on
3G and other functions; the jury rejected its claims.
Since then, Samsung has mounted a series of
complaints against the jury decision, and sought to have it struck out. It is
separately taking the decision to the US Court of Appeals to seek to have the
decision thrown out, and patents in the case invalidated. Apple meanwhile is
seeking to have the damages increased.
For Apple, the reduction – even if only
temporary – is the latest in a number of setbacks after it won the case last
August. When it sought a sales ban on the Samsung devices that had infringed,
Koh turned it down on the basis that Apple hadn't shown that the device sales
were linked to the patent infringements – what she called a "causal
nexus".
Another trial between the two companies is
set for 2014, after Apple claimed last year that Samsung was still infringing
on other patented technologies.
"We are pleased that the court decided to strike
$450,514,650 from the jury's award," Samsung said in a statement. [GuardianTech]
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