rob53
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This week on AI: Apple's Supreme Court loss, AirPods delay exposed, in-theaters iTunes rentals & mo
If you read the actual SCOTUS decision, it doesn't say Samsung won and Apple lost, it simply says the court has to instruct the jury a little differently and let the jury decide (again) using the following:
"This case requires us to address a threshold matter: the scope of the term “article of manufacture.” The only question we resolve today is whether, in the case of a multicomponent product, the relevant “article of manufacture” must always be the end product sold to the consumer or whether it can also be a component of that product. Under the former interpretation, a patent holder will always be entitled to the infringer’s total profit from the end product. Under the latter interpretation, a patent holder will sometimes be entitled to the infringer’s total profit from a component of the end product."
All Samsung won is another chance in court to try and persuade a jury that the "article of manufacture" in question is the end product or entire iPhone and not just a component or iPhone screen. Once the jury decides, they can then either justifiably award Apple with Samsung's entire profits for all offending phones or just the profits/costs of the iPhone screen. The problem with this is Samsung has flooded the market with copies of the iPhone to the point where jurists can't really tell the difference and think all phones look the same anyway so why should Apple benefit from this decision.
Samsung isn't challenging the FACT they lost in court, no matter what any other court, including the SCOTUS, says about design patents being valid (Apple's design patents were upheld in this decision by the way), they are only challenging how much money they have to pay. The bigger issue is Samsung has gotten away with stealing then using Apple's design patents to get a major foothold in the market, well, not a foothold but the majority of mobile devices sold/given-away worldwide. If the courts had stopped Samsung in the beginning things would have been different. Samsung might still sell the majority of mobile devices but they would have had to design them differently and they might or might not have sold as well. We'll never know because Samsung got away with it and the US government and courts allowed them to.
This will be the legacy of Steve Jobs and Apple as well as the corrupt US Government, patent and court system. If you're not willing to buy off government officials, something that's always been done by corporations, it will be difficult to really succeed. Apple has generated a tremendous amount of success without the amount of corruption most major corporations, including Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, have obviously been involved in.
