“Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. must narrow their patent-infringement lawsuit case scheduled for trial in 2014, a judge ruled,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg.
“U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose, California, today told lawyers from both companies that they must ‘focus and streamline’ their cases to 25 patent claims, or elements of the patents at issue, and 25 accused products,” Rosenblatt reports. “‘We’ll keep narrowing and narrowing,’ Koh said. ‘You’ve already been litigating this thing for a year; you must know something about what’s your best case.'”
Rosenblatt reports, “Koh last month rejected Apple’s request to add additional damages to the first patent-infringement case between the two companies in San Jose. In that case, a jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion, finding the Suwon, South Korea-based company infringed six of the iPhone maker’s mobile-device patents.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The wheels of justice fell off due to inaction months ago.
Heckuva job, Lucy.
More like the wheels of injustice, just got brand new high performance tires mounted. What a Skull Fck.
How about respecting IP rights for patent holders Lucy?
Luuuuuuucy??????!!!!
Did the Judge send notice from her Samsung Note 2? Or was it a Galaxy 3?
“Justice delayed is justice denied”.
Narrow claims for narrow minds…
For those of you who think a trial like this can be hurried up, consider: even with the issues limited to 25 possible patent violations by each of 25 products, that makes 625 issues to litigate… by each side, for a total of 1250. Each of those issues requires separate factual evidence (with direct and cross-examination of each of the witnesses on each issue) and legal argument. I can barely imagine that even a judge with patent and high-tech expertise could keep all that stuff straight over the course of a trial that might last for months. Now imagine how a jury is going to cope!
Yes, some patents are not worth having or protecting in Lucy’s court. Just because someone violates many many patents, they must be able to get away with a few. Justice?
While we’re pulling numbers out of our asses, why not just make it 10 claims and products? Why not 5?
Whatever makes it easier on Lucy should be the number the parties should come to. Billion dollar infringements? Nah. Let’s just make sure the judge gets her mandated 26 days of vacation each year – along with those 10 Federal holidays.
Koh defines modern concepts of:
– Justice Delayed
– Emotional Judgement
– Technology Ignorance
I expect others here can add to this list of shame. Her behavior is worthy of our ridicule.
So if this were a serial murder trial would she be saying, ” Which of these crimes is the most heinous? You’ve had a year to think about it. We’ll just ignore the other murders” Pathetic.
Ok, for those of you who think that it is unreasonable to limit the trial to 1250 issues, how about allowing each side 100 products and 100 patents? That will just require the jury to hear testimony on, and resolve, 20,000 separate questions. At some point, and I suspect far before the number of trial issues reaches 1000, you are more likely to get a just result by tossing dice. Perhaps the U.S needs some other way to resolve these disputes. I’m not suggesting that they don’t need resolving–thieves need to be stopped–but the courts are really, really poorly equipped to handle exceptionally complex litigation.
Narrow down our claims so a narrow minded judge can try to work it out.