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Feds Ask Supreme Court To Void Apple's $400 Million Award From Samsung (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the San Jose Mercury News technology blog: "The $400 million awarded to Apple in a patent-infringement case against Samsung is a moving target... On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a "friend of the court" brief to the Supreme Court, asking justices to void the $400 million award and send the case back to a lower court to determine if a new trial is needed... Samsung has argued that it should be liable only for profits attributable to a specific design that violated a patent, not an entire phone, and that the law should be interpreted to impose liability related to "components of the phones, rather than the phones themselves, according to the brief. The department came down on Samsung's side on the component argument, and blasted a federal circuit court ruling that had upheld the jury award.
Ironically, earlier this week Steve Wozniak was praising Samsung for its innovation, both in virtual reality headsets and with a Samsung camera that takes a picture whenever you say "smile".
Ironically, earlier this week Steve Wozniak was praising Samsung for its innovation, both in virtual reality headsets and with a Samsung camera that takes a picture whenever you say "smile".
Last month I went to Taipei to interview a retired display device geek for a story I'm writing. He explained that the touch display technology was originally German, and that his mentor bought it from the German firm hoping to use it in touch screen ATM (CRT based, I think) when the German company went chapter 11 ("They had a great technology, but no application"). They got it to work on small LCDs, and the Taiwanese group pitched it to a company making Ipods for touch displays, he's not sure how it went from there to telephones. Apple got the guys mentor to open a shop in Vancouver to claim the device was independently developed there rather than Taiwan. I still don't have all the history covered, still grey areas, and I've been studying this for years. I don't understand the utility of asking juries to award $400M patent awards based on "telephones" with "rounded corners".
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