“Apple Inc., after seeking $2 billion in damages, won only $120 million from Samsung Electronics Co. in a jury trial over smartphone technology,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg. “The verdict sets the stage for the iPhone maker to seek a judge’s order banning U.S. sales of its rival’s devices that infringed its patents. The jury also found that Apple infringed one Samsung patent, awarding it $158,000 in damages.”
“‘It is hard to view this outcome as much of a victory for Apple,’ Brian Love, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, said in an e-mail. ‘This amount is less than 10 percent of the amount Apple requested and probably doesn’t surpass by too much the amount Apple spent litigating this case,'” Rosenblatt reports. “Jurors found that Samsung infringed two of the four Apple patents it considered in a case, which revolved around whether the maker of Galaxy phones used features in Google Inc.’s Android operating system that copied the iPhone maker’s technology. A finding that Samsung infringed the auto-correction patent was issued by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh before the trial.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier today:
An iPhone with a larger screen option will hurt Samsung immeasurably more than myriad, unending traipses through the legal morass.
Moral of the story: Crime pays. Very, very, very well. And patents are basically useless in protecting intellectual property when the advance made is too significant. As with the Mac, Apple could not, would not be allowed to totally dominate unit sales with their revolutionary iPhone. Period. (Even though Apple does dominate where it counts: Profit share.)
So, knock off at will, thieves. You’ll get away with it and make far, far more than you’ll ever lose (even though thinking people with consciences will look down upon your wares and never consider buying them).
And, Apple: Good luck finding the motivation to change the world yet again when you know, for a fact, that it will be knocked off by some scumbag company somewhere that knows even more clearly today that, in the end, it’ll get away with it pretty much scot-free. Luckily for the world (and the criminals like Microsoft and Samsung), Apple seems to be motivated to please themselves and their customers, even though they know in the hearts that what they are inventing, what is supposed to be their intellectual property, will begin to be pilfered by greedy thieves the moment it is released.
If any good comes out of this verdict, it’s that a precedent has been set. One thing Apple doesn’t need is money.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
Hhere’s what cellphones looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
