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Apple, Samsung Face New iPhone Damages Trial (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California issued her order late on Sunday, 10 months after the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a $399 million award against Samsung, whose devices include the Galaxy. The three Apple patents covered design elements of the iPhone such as its black rectangular front face, rounded corners, and colorful grid of icons for programs and apps. Koh's order is a setback for Apple, which called a retrial unnecessary and said the award should be confirmed. The $399 million represented profit from Samsung's sales of infringing smartphones, though the South Korean company has said it deserved reimbursement if it prevailed in the litigation. It was part of a $548 million payment that Samsung made to Apple in December 2015. The legal dispute concerned whether the "article of manufacture" for which Samsung owed damages included its entire smartphones, or only parts that infringed Apple patents.
It's worth noting that Samsung won the same case regarding tablets - they convinced the jury that the elements in the Apple design patent for the iPad already existed in other products and popular culture (2001, Star Trek, etc) long before the iPad. In fact if you look at Samsung's digital picture frame from 2006, it's pretty clear their Galaxy Tab simply re-used that face design, rather than copying the iPad. And if anything, it was Apple who copied Samsung. (Except of course Samsung never got a design patent on a black rectangle with rounded corners - because that'd be silly and the USPTO would never grant it, right?)
The only reason Samsung lost to the design patent on phones was because they missed a filing deadline. They'd put together a document showing pre-production models and design concepts of Samsung phones prior to the iPhone's release. Demonstrating that their phone designs already incorporated all the elements in Apple's design patent before the patent was granted. Unfortunately, Judge Koh prohibited Samsung from showing that evidence to the jury because they missed the filing deadline.
BTW, a lot of other Apple patents should never have been granted. Here's pinch-to-zoom in 1988. And the "bounce" animation is just the transient response of an underdamped second order system that every freshman engineering student learns.