Supreme Court Throws Out $399M Judgment Against Samsung in Apple Patent Dispute

A jury found that Samsung’s design had infringed on that patent, and the circuit court upheld the ruling in Apple’s favor previous year, awarding the entire $399 million Samsung made in profits from the phone to Apple.

It looks like Samsung might just wiggle its way out of the $399 million fine it was ordered to pay to Apple after a lengthy patent dispute case, though it won’t get out entirely unscathed.

Following this, the law also says the patent violator of the product when sued does not have to pay out their entire profits from the sales, but only the profits received from the copied components. Samsung claimed that since a design patent is applied to only a component of a product, legal penalties should be limited to those profits attributable to the component. The seemingly never-ending patent fight centers on whether Apple is entitled to all of the profits Samsung gained from the infringing Samsung devices. The key ruling by the Supreme Court could help Samsung claw back some of the $538 million it paid Apple following a 2012 ruling that found its smartphones ripped-off elements of the Apple’s design.

Josh hopes that when the case will be brought back to the lower courts they will send a clear message to the world that stealing products designs of any kind is not appropriate. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit later upheld the patent-infringement verdict but reduced damages to $548 million.

The decision, in essence, reshapes a more-than-century-old law on design patents, says Case Collard, a partner at the global law firm Dorsey & Whitney who focuses on intellectual property. The dispute resided on whether to “article of manufacture” is the finished product on its entirety or if it defines a component in a product. “It will potentially reduce design patent damages”.

Almost two months after its hearing on the case, the Supreme Court reversed Tuesday for Samsung.

“A smartphone is smart because it contains hundreds of thousands of the technologies that make it work”, Samsung argued at one point, as cited by Apple Insider. The South Korean company said Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016, that the Galaxy S8 smartphone will let users order food or perform other tasks without going through a third-party application but by simply asking the phone’s virtual assistant.

The Supreme Court returned the case to the Federal Circuit for further consideration.

“Unfortunately, the Court did not give lower courts any guidance as to how to determine whether the “article of manufacture” in any given case is the product sold to consumers or a component”.

” ‘The game then becomes, what’s the article of manufacture?’ says Daryl Joseffer, who formerly served as principal deputy USA solicitor general”.

Apple’s case against Samsung began in earnest when Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” on Google’s Android operating system, which he believed to be an imitation of Apple’s iOS.