Justices side with Samsung: $399M Apple award set aside

But things aren’t over quite yet.

The Supreme Court sided with Samsung on Tuesday and unanimously reversed an earlier appeals court ruling that the company must pay $399 million to Apple for patent infringement.

The case will now head back to a lower court to determine what Samsung should pay, USA Today said.

9to5Mac released an update on its original story about the Supreme Court Decision and it said that Apple has finally responded. Samsung had argued that that the logic behind Apple’s $399-million victory could have been applied to all the profits from an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which included a patent infringing single cup holder.

Samsung and Apple have been fighting it out in court since 2011, Apple were previously awarded damages against Samsung of $399 million relating to 11 patents on the iPhone.

The ruling reshapes the value of designs, and how much one company has to pay for copying the look of a competitor’s product.

In May 2015, a US appellate court upheld the verdict of patent infringement, but said the iPhone’s appearance could not be protected by trademarks, resulting in that decision in reducing Samsung’s payment.

The court returned the case to the lower court Tuesday, saying the damages should be computed based on the profit Samsung gained from specific infringing parts of the phones, not necessarily based on the entire product. In October, Chief Justice John Roberts had said during a hearing that Samsung did not infringe on “all the chips and wires”. The Supreme Court Justices did not go so far as to give a definition or test for the article of manufacture, leaving that lengthy and detailed process to the federal appeals court, where the lawsuit will now return. The eleven-page ruling found that the infringement penalty was highly inappropriate as it represented the entire profit that Samsung generated from sales of its infringing Galaxy smartphone devices.

Cupertino, California-based Apple, however, expects the lower court to stick to the figure, which itself is a discounted figure from the original penalty of almost $1 billion. The amount may be small for both Samsung and Apple but we all know this isn’t just about money.