“Shortly after the start of the Apple v. Samsung limited damages retrial in the Northern District of California I concluded from various reports that ‘modesty and humility reign,'” Florian Müller writes for FOSS Patents. “The court ‘only’ allowed Apple to present a damages claim of $380 million to the jury, slightly short of the corresponding portion of last year’s award ($410 million), and Samsung is pretending contrition in an effort to propitiate the jury.”
“Apple’s claim became publicly known only when the trial started. Before trial, it was just known that Samsung complained about Apple seeking “vastly greater” damages, allegedly ‘hundreds of millions’ more than the year before,” Müller writes. “It was also discoverable that Samsung’s pretrial motions had succeeded in part to constrain Apple’s ability to seek damages. The quantitative impact was unclear, however.”
“Late on Friday, Judge Koh entered a motion on certain motions for judgment as a matter of law, and that order, in conjunction with a couple of previous decisions, suggests to me that the most important legal question on which Samsung prevailed (subject to an appeal) is about the underlying, hypothetical assumption of when Samsung would have begun to avoid infringement of the infringed patents: when actual infringement began or when it received notice of Apple’s infringement claims,” Müller writes. “For example, the designaround period for the relevant design patents is considered to be one month. The question is when that month would begin.”
“The district court agreed with Samsung that Apple’s claim of lost profits due to Samsung’s infringement must be based on the assumption that Samsung’s designaround efforts would have started when infringement began, not when Apple notified it of its infringement claims,” Müller writes. “On this basis, Apple can seek lost profits only with respect to the ‘915 pinch-to-zoom API patent, but not with respect to four other patents (two design patents, the rubber-banding ‘381 patent, and the tap-to-zoom-and-navigate ‘163 patent) that Samsung would have hypothetically worked around even before it had notice, i.e., before the relevant damages period.”
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MacDailyNews Take: It’s difficult to imagine Apple ever being properly compensated for the damage inflicted due to the slavish copier Samsung’s serial IP thefts.