“Jurors who awarded Apple Inc. more than $1 billion in its intellectual-property battle with Samsung Electronics Co. relied on e-mails describing Google Inc.’s influence to arrive at their decision,” Joel Rosenblatt, Karen Gullo and Douglas MacMillan report for Bloomberg.
“Velvin Hogan, foreman of the nine-member panel, said yesterday in an interview that jurors went through a ‘meticulous’ process of determining that Samsung infringed Apple’s products. When it came time to determine whether the infringement was ‘willful,’ or intentional, ‘we knew where we had to go in the evidence,’ Hogan said, referring to the e- mails,” Rosenblatt, Gullo and MacMillan report. “The e-mails included an internal 2010 Samsung message describing how Google asked it to change the design of its products to look less like Apple’s.”
Rosenblatt, Gullo and MacMillan report, “The jury’s finding that the infringement was intentional allows U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, to triple the damages next month when she considers Apple’s request to bar sales of some Samsung products. ‘Certain actors at the highest level at Samsung Electronics Co.gave orders to the sub-entities to actually copy,’ Hogan said. ‘So the whole thing hinges on whether you think Samsung was actually copying. The thing that did it for us was when we saw the memo from Google telling Samsung to back away from the Apple design. The entity that had to do that actually didn’t back away,’ said the 67-year-old San Jose resident.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Tim Cook memo to Apple employees: Court victory over Samsung ‘is about values’ – August 26, 2012
Jury finds Samsung willfully violated Apple patents – August 24, 2012
