Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Must Pay Apple $539 Million For Infringing iPhone Design Patents, Jury Finds (cnet.com)
Samsung must pay Apple $539 million for infringing five patents with Android phones it sold in 2010 and 2011, a jury has found in a legal fight that dates back seven years. "The unanimous decision, in the U.S. District Court in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, is just about halfway between what the two largest mobile phone makers had sought in a high-profile case that reaches back to 2011," reports CNET. From the report: The bulk of the damages payment, $533,316,606, was for infringing three Apple design patents. The remaining $5,325,050 was for infringing two utility patents. Samsung already had been found to infringe the patents, but this trial determined some of the damages. The jury's rationale isn't clear, but the figure is high enough to help cement the importance of design patents in the tech industry. Even though they only describe cosmetic elements of a product, they clearly can have a lot of value.
Samsung showed its displeasure and indicated the fight isn't over. "Today's decision flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung on the scope of design patent damages. We will consider all options to obtain an outcome that does not hinder creativity and fair competition for all companies and consumers," Samsung said.
Samsung showed its displeasure and indicated the fight isn't over. "Today's decision flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung on the scope of design patent damages. We will consider all options to obtain an outcome that does not hinder creativity and fair competition for all companies and consumers," Samsung said.
They already fought it all the way up the chain. The Supreme Court overturned a previous award of $399M and sent it back to the lower court for re-adjudication, because they agreed with Samsung that the 3 design patents for minor little details like rounded corners, a screen that takes up most of the front face, and a shiny black finish were not a substantial enough part of the overall product that Apple should be entitled to their entire profits under a 19th century law intended to protect the designs of ornaments with very simple functional purpose and deriving most of their value from their ornamental design. And now the home jury decides to punish Samsung further for daring to ask for fairness in the award amount by raising it beyond the total amount of profit.
Watching on from the other side of the world, it is sad to see America reduced to tribalism in their political and judicial decision making like this. Everything has become about supporting the home team, and sticking it hard to the opposition.
Well, Samsung copied the phone design, the UI and even the box it shipped in. They also debated it in internal emails.
Now, in a court of law you can't just stand up with a phone in each hand and say "look how alike they are, your Honor, what do you think?", instead you have to argue in great detail for each individual bit, such as corner shape/radius, button shape or feel, individual icons, etc. etc.. and then finally bring it to a conclusion. Thus, out of context we end up with the silly rounded corner debacle while the real case covered a lot more ground.
No, they aren't trademarks. Design patents are different in several ways. First, is the limited time nature - a trademark can last forever (if you keep using it, but a design patent lasts 5 years.
Second, a trademark is infringed by similarity, whereas a design patent is infringed if you implement everything.
You use trademarks if you plan on using a design element or word or sound for a long time consistently. If it's something you plan on using for one item, you do a design patent.
The "rounded corners" patent is a design patent - to violate it, you must have the following things - a device with rounded corners, a screen with a grid of icons, part of that grid of icons has a static collection of icons across pages of the grid. No Android phone (other than Samsung) had those features - rounded corners yes, grid of icons yes, but no static tray of icons as well. The Android home screen has a static tray of icons, but it lacks a grid of icons, because it has widgets (the clock is prominent on the home screen for a reason). The Android app launcher has a grid of icons, but it lacks the static tray of icons.
Just those little element tweaks mean generic Android never violated the patents. But TouchWiz did - other than the actual icons themselves (which weren't part of the patents), Samsung made their app launcher look just like iOS complete with static track, row of dots in the middle showing current page , etc.
I remember seeing back around the time some company was advertising a "free iPod" with purchase of one of their computers. The 'iPod" was a third party clone of the iPod Mini, and within a week, those ads were gone. For about a year or two - they came back, presumably because the patent expired and it was legal to sell an MP3 player that looked like an old iPod.