Samsung Vs Apple Patent Retrial Rules In Apple's Favour
Apple Inc. won $539 million from Samsung Electronics Co. in the final throes of the companies’ U.S. court struggle over smartphone technology, seven years after the start of a global patent battle.
Apple sought about $1 billion in a retrial of a case that originally produced a verdict of that amount in 2012, while Samsung argued it should pay only $28 million this time.
I don’t care about the monetary value of this stuff. I’m sure Samsung and Apple don’t either; lawyer fees of an eight-year long legal case of this magnitude must already sum into the hundreds of millions of dollars. What Apple argued is that the infringement covers the full value of the copycat phones, not merely the value of the constituent components that cause the infringement. The jury sided with Apple on that, and I do too.
What’s great about this lawsuit is that it has dragged on for so long, the industry landscape has changed so much. Modern Samsung phones do not try and look like an iPhone at all. They have their own brand, their own style. A Galaxy S9 does not look like an iPhone 8 or an iPhone X. They are distinct offerings, and that’s great. In fact, whilst almost all other Android phone manufacturers have jumped on the notch screen design to leech off of the iPhone X’s curtails, Samsung defiantly treads a different path.