Apple & Samsung to bring legal battle to US Supreme Court on Tuesday
In its first case over design patents in some 120 years, the U.S. Supreme Court will tackle the outcome of the biggest Apple v. Samsung lawsuit on Tuesday, as Samsung looks to reduce the scope of damages owed.
Samsung will argue that it shouldn't have had to pay $399 million in damages ordered by lower courts, Bloomberg noted on Monday. The company has used the analogy of a cupholder in a car, suggesting that it wouldn't be fair to award the entire profits from a vehicle for something that makes just a partial contribution.
While Apple has acknowledged that in some cases a patent holder should only be able to collect profits linked to a specific component, it has also insisted that the patents in its case against Samsung were more equivalent to the design of an entire car, and that Samsung earlier failed to demonstrate that the patents applied to just parts of 11 infringing phones -- all of which are no longer on sale.
The Supreme Court will have three basic options: upholding the damages, invalidating them, or ordering a retrial to decide the exact amount.
Samsung has already paid Apple the $399 million, along with a further $150 million for violating a "pinch-to-zoom" patent. Combined, though, both sums are already far lower than the more than $1 billion a jury initially leveled against Samsung. That figure was reduced severely in later legal proceedings.
The outcome of the Supreme Court fight could impact Apple's attempt to collect another $180 million, and possibly a recent U.S. federal appeals court ruling, which reinstated $119.6 million in damages for Samsung's infringement of a "slide-to-unlock" patent.
Samsung will argue that it shouldn't have had to pay $399 million in damages ordered by lower courts, Bloomberg noted on Monday. The company has used the analogy of a cupholder in a car, suggesting that it wouldn't be fair to award the entire profits from a vehicle for something that makes just a partial contribution.
While Apple has acknowledged that in some cases a patent holder should only be able to collect profits linked to a specific component, it has also insisted that the patents in its case against Samsung were more equivalent to the design of an entire car, and that Samsung earlier failed to demonstrate that the patents applied to just parts of 11 infringing phones -- all of which are no longer on sale.
The Supreme Court will have three basic options: upholding the damages, invalidating them, or ordering a retrial to decide the exact amount.
Samsung has already paid Apple the $399 million, along with a further $150 million for violating a "pinch-to-zoom" patent. Combined, though, both sums are already far lower than the more than $1 billion a jury initially leveled against Samsung. That figure was reduced severely in later legal proceedings.
The outcome of the Supreme Court fight could impact Apple's attempt to collect another $180 million, and possibly a recent U.S. federal appeals court ruling, which reinstated $119.6 million in damages for Samsung's infringement of a "slide-to-unlock" patent.
Comments
But, I am also conflicted about patenting functional aspects of anything. It is like an incandescent light bulb manufacturer saying nobody else can produce a product that produces light (even it is uses a different technology like LED or fluorescence).
There is no easy or obvious answers to these questions.
I don't think Apple deserves a part of their profits I think they deserve 100% of their profits. Samscums intention was to copy Apple 100% as shown in their 132 page document they wrote on how to copy Apple pixel by pixel.
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The Bottom Line
Here's another article: http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/the-differences-between-bribery-and-lobbying.aspx
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E.g. patent trolls like VirnetX already have hundreds of millions of damage awards
against Apple (under appeal) for demanding X% of Apple's profits for a single feature,
among the thousands of features in a cellphone. Both Apple and VirnetX have
had underlying patents invalidated by USPTO with damages non-intuitively
surviving on technicalities having to do with differing standards of review in federal court.
Perhaps design patents are different because they are harder to apportion,
but I hope that any favorable ruling for Apple doesn't come back to bite.
In this case, patent scholar Mark Lemley (who has filed a friends-of-the-court brief
to the Supremes for this matter) also has written seminal articles about "patent holdup", "royalty stacking"
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/stacking.pdf
and on whether patent validity decisions should even be given to juries at all:
http://www.virginialawreview.org/sites/virginialawreview.org/files/Lemley_Book.pdf
This is symbolic of our pay-to-play justice system. The Court should fine Apple and Samsung a minimum of 1 billion dollars each for wasting the Court's time.
For those who wonder why SCOTUS would accept this case and what the questions of law are the BBC has a wonderfully written article.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37614014
"The question the judges are essentially asking is: why do people buy a certain phone? Is it because of how it looks, or how it functions?
Samsung says it's mostly the latter, and therefore the damages should be a lot lower as there's an awful lot more work that goes into a phone beyond its aesthetics.
Apple takes the opposite view - it's the iconic design of the iPhone that had if flying off the shelves, it argues, and so if Samsung stole that design then that profit money should surely be Apple's. "
Samsung wanted to jumpstart itself into this new market after the disruption of the iPhone by copying the look of the iPhone for marketing, not technical reasons. The fact that Samsung did not have the years of either industrial design experience or deep interface and OS experience that Apple had, makes this, to me, an open and shut case of copying, acknowledged by pretty much everyone.
By all measures, it is the disruption that the iPhone design brought to the market that makes this case unique. At the same time, that dynamic has passed, and while I would like Samsung to have to pay all it's profits for blatant copying early on, it makes no sense to set a precedence based on the limited case of a disruptive product.
So as for your comments on "copying" that's not an issue that SCOTUS is considering and whether Samsung did or did not (they did) has nothing to do with the arguments being made in front of the Justices today. Like you I think many other commenters in this thread are erroneously assuming this is about copying the iPhone. It is not.
"The Supreme Court is raising serious doubts about a $399 million judgment against smartphone maker Samsung for illegally copying parts of the patented design of Apple's iPhone.
Justices hearing arguments Tuesday in the long-running dispute seemed troubled that Samsung was ordered to pay all the profits it earned from 11 phone models even though the features at issue are just a tiny part of the devices.
But some justices struggled over how a jury should be instructed if the case is sent back to a lower court.
"If I were a juror, I wouldn't know what to do," said Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Justice Stephen Breyer appeared to embrace a test proposed by Facebook, Google and other internet companies that would outline new limits on such damage awards. Other justices seemed to favor a different test proposed by the Obama administration.
"Why can't we just ask the lower courts to listen to your arguments and work it out," Breyer asked at one point.
The outcome could have ripple effects across the high-tech industry as the court balances the need to encourage innovation against a desire to protect lucrative design patents. It marks the first time in more than 120 years that the high court has taken up a patent dispute over a product's design."