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Judge Koh Rules: Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe
sfcrazy writes "In a nutshell there won't be a new trial in the Apple V. Samsung case, as Samsung wanted, because the judge thinks that the trial was fair despite allegations that the jury foreman could have been biased. She also ruled that there won't be any more money for Apple as the iPhone maker failed to prove they were 'undercompensated' by the jury. The most important ruling was that she found that 'Samsung did not willfully infringe.'"
With this ruling neither side are going to be happy (and frankly it's somewhat self-contradictory as well)...
Both sides will be writing up appeals no doubt so this story is far from over yet - it'll be very interesting to hear what gets presented to the higher court and what their take on the foreman is.
Seeking treble damages is SOP for these kinds of suits. You do it because you have a reasonable chance of succeeding and there is no penalty for the attempt.
Anyway, don't be quick to jump to Samsung's defense because they're on the other end of Apple in this suit, or because they make your favorite smartphone. Samsung pretty much owns the SK govt and aggressively attacks its overseas competitors in every manner you could imagine. There are plenty of blogs detailing Samsung's domestic abuses of power (That far predate any smartphone). Samsung isn't a friendly company and they aren't looking out for you. Like any company, they just want your money.
Judge Koh knew that she has seriously fcuked up in the original trial.
This second round ruling - that Samsung does not "willfully" infringe on Apple's patents - is nothing less than a face saving move.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
From the summary:
She also ruled that there won't be any more money for Apple
From the article:
So, Samsung owes Apple US $1 billion for a non will ful infringement.
"More" in this case would be $3B as da,ages may be tripled for willful infringement.
General feelings from the Apple side is that this is unfortunate but would rather Apple stop wasting time on it. General opinion from the Samsung/Android side is, **** Apple, waste as much money as possible.
This had *nothing* to do with feelings. Apple is unable to maintain its massive mark-ups of rebadged foxconn phones through innovation; its massive market share gone; the days of the iPhone killer long behind us; its marketing machine pushing it as the *one* phone turning on Apple. When Jobs went thermonuclear on Android he should have been spending money on diverse product lines; Company acquisitions....hell competed on price, but instead he deicide to *litigate* over a few interface patents on devices covered by thousands of patents, often shared at little or no cost between traditional phone manufactures.
This court case was a massive win for Apple, but without product bans...toothless. I suspect even with them there are simply too many compelling Android phones; from a diverse collection of manufactures. All with an Mountain!? of there own patents [Hell even Google has them now]...Apple is terrified of them forming a cartel.
The bottom line is this is nothing to do with feelings this is everything about poor corporate strategy.
One very important sentence in the groklaw article:
Am I reading this correctly? Apple has invalid patents but still got damages out of them? Does this mean they are a one-shot deal and that other manufacturers can infringe now? In this case 1 billion dollars to render Apple's portfolio irrelevant was effectively very cheap, given the size of the relevant market.
[cough]iPhone snags its highest U.S. market share ever[/cough]
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23916413#.UQte-5G3PGg *Worldwide* Q4 post earning release from a real market analyst. However you spin it Apples share of the pie is shrinking. In Larger markets than the US like China Apple have no market share...and don't have a competitive product in that market. You should reread my post, its pretty good.
Samsung was manufacturing real products and not using litigation as a business method until Apple started the legal war.
Couldn't agree more. I'm posting anonymously for reasons that will become obvious below...
I work for a direct competitor of Samsung in a different space to smartphones. Samsung is a relative newcomer in our market, and are comparatively tiny compared to the big players (such as my employer, one of the "big 5" in our industry).
Right now, we're shitting our pants over them. Their product is half the price of ours and around 3/4 the quality. They'll bump the quality up to ours or higher and easily keep their price below. I KNOW they can do this, because they manufacture a lot of the components that we have to buy; and can integrate their technologies much more fluidly than we can.
Our management are looking at all kinds of legal ways to try to fight them, including digging through our patents to figure out what we can sue them for. The simple fact of the matter is, they've got a product that WILL be better than ours and instead of improving our devices to stay ahead, we want to try to squash them down before they become too big.
I'm seriously considering looking in to employment at Samsung in the coming years...
The relevant questions were asked of the jury. Hogan gave misleading answers to those questions.
If the jury had found for Samsung on every point, despite Hogan's possible bias against Samsung and their position, of course there wouldn't be a basis to demand a new trial. A better question might be whether Apple would be demanding a new trial had an anti-Apple zealot made it onto the jury by concealing their past history with Apple and then browbeating the other jurors into ignoring and misinterpreting law in a way that favoured Samsung.
And I think we all know the answer to that one.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.