“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:
Fight Samsung in skirmishes with lawyers, but for the major battles fight them with engineers, vertical integration of part supplies, rapid innovation, and new markets.
The Samsung/Android partnership is starting to look a lot like the Dell/MS duo. And we all know what is happening there!
No wonder Apple has become extremely tight lipped about new product development. Samsung had the advantage of having one of their own on Apple Board of Directors. This gave them the inside scoop on the iPhone, thus giving the opportunity to develop a knockoff shortly after it debut.
Apple will not make that same mistake twice. Apple was able to keep secret the use of 64 bit processors in its latest line of iDevices, catching their competitors off guard and playing catch up.
It will take another year or two before Apple’s competitors have wares to compete with them. Even when they do, Apple will still have a several year head start on them, putting them in a virtual state of catch up.
The jury appears to be confused about the difference between testimony given by witnesses and posturing performed by lawyers.
“The jury deciding Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.’s $2 billion patent-infringement case asked the judge for additional evidence about whether Google Inc. was mentioned when Steve Jobs, the iPhone maker’s co-founder, decided to sue,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg.”
Looks like they bought the idea that patents and IP aren’t worth much.
Or maybe they were thinking Google is the maker and theif of Android, Sue the parent and get paid there.
Not part of the trial at hand and not the jury’s decision.
If somebody dings your Chevy Cobalt and you have to sue them, you don’t get a new car. You get the difference in value between a dinged and undinged Cobalt. If Samsung violates an Apple patent, Apple doesn’t get all the money that Samsung made selling Galaxies, or even all the money Apple lost because the Galaxies were on sale. It gets the difference between what it lost to the infringing Galaxies and what it would have lost to an otherwise identical Samsung product that legally worked around the two patents in this lawsuit. Looked at that way, $120 million is a fair chunk of change. Next time, Samsung may prefer spending a few million on the workaround. The other handset companies that aren’t making any profits certainly will. This lawsuit was always about deterrence never about collecting revenue.
I agree, the money was never the object and the price should only be some reasonable compensation reflecting the value or value impact of the stolen IP.
That said, they’ve already discovered sloppy math on the part of the jury that looks to triple the judgement. Wonder what the impact would be if they could correct the sloppy thinking.
Thank you Txuser. I feel a bit better now. I’m going over to Vanity Fair now to read the inside story of the litigation, it is just out
The total hit to Samsung has to be seen as the damages plus whatever they spent to defend themselves, which has to be considerable.
——RM