A US Court of Appeals has
"split the baby" in a decision that preserves Apple's
victory against Samsung in its first patent-infringement trial, but will also result in a likely significant reduction of damages due from the Korean company. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in California has upheld the jury's finding that Samsung copied design and utility patents from Apple, but has tossed the same jury's finding of guilt regarding "trade dress" violations.
In the first patent-infringement trial between the two tech giants in 2012, a jury found Samsung
guilty of infringing a wide range of Apple patents when it abruptly altered the course of its normal smartphone development to pivot into making devices that bore -- and continue to bear -- a strong resemblance to Apple's iPhone. The original jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages, though Judge Lucy Koh later retried a portion of the award that ultimately reduced it
to $930 million.
The Appeals Court's decision to invalidate the jury finding on "trade dress" intellectual property violations means that the damages award must again be re-calculated in a new damages trial, and will almost certainly result in a significantly lower award for Apple. However, the court also turned down Samsung's request for yet another full retrial of the case.
The four "trade dress" patents Apple charged Samsung with copying in the original trial included the widely-mischaracterized "rectangle with rounded corners" concept, along with other non-specific design elements (such as a dock at the bottom of the display) which are ubiquitous in mobile devices now, but were wholly new concepts in 2007 when the iPhone first appeared, at least with regards to what were then referred to as "smartphones" at the time.
This may not be the end of the line for appeals from either of the two companies, which both appealed various aspects of Judge Lucy Koh's final ruling in 2012. Apple's largely-ineffective argument thus far has been that only large damage awards will stop "serial copier" Samsung and others from continuing to make enormous profits off of stolen design and utility technology. Samsung has largely relied on the fact that the general design concepts for smartphones set by the iPhone are now so ubiquitous (in part due to its own efforts at emulating them) that actual harm is impossible to calculate, thus avoiding any financial culpability for its convictions.
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