“On Monday, Judge Koh denied Apple a permanent injunction against Samsung over the patents the jury had found infringed, but that does not mean that Samsung is free to infringe,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “Apart from the fact that I believe Apple will ultimately win some injunction on appeal (because patents are exclusionary rights under the Constitution and if Apple doesn’t win one in this case, no patent holder in this industry ever will), there’s an important consequence of the denial that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere, so I want to talk about it now.”

“Contrary to popular misbelief, the strategically most important issue now is not the one of whatever adjustments Judge Koh may make to the jury’s billion-dollar damages award,” Mueller writes. “Whether it goes up to $1.5 billion (Apple would love that) or down to $800 million is not going to change the situation between these two companies.”

Mueller writes, “The key issue remaining in Judge Koh’s court now is about damages, but not about past damages. It’s about future damages, more commonly referred to in legal documents and write-ups as ‘post-judgment royalties.’”

Much more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]