“The jurors deciding the outcome of the second Apple vs Samsung trial haven’t yet returned a verdict, but their options are limited to a few possible outcomes, ranging from a fiery thermonuclear blast to a wintery new Dark Ages,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “The first verdict the jury could potentially render is to return a decision along the lines of Judge Richard Posner’s in the parallel iPhone-related patent trial between Apple and Motorola. In that case, Judge Posner decided that, at least in the case of Apple’s iPhone, patents should have no value because if they did, Motorola would be left trying to sell Google’s indisputably ‘inferior non-Apple technology’ and it would be ‘catastrophic’ if customers had only one source to obtain Apple technology.”
“A second outcome, only slightly worse for Apple, would occur if the jury decided to award Apple nothing while taking seriously Samsung’s counterclaims for the two patents it acquired for its cynical countersuit-defense after being sued by Apple in 2011,” Dilger writes. “The amount of money Samsung asked for is small because the entire point of Samsung’s countersuit was to portray all patents as worth very little, in a hopeful bid to reduce its own liability for infringement of Apple’s patents.”
“The jury might also select a more charitable possible outcome by ‘fairly’ awarding both sides everything they asked for. In this case, Samsung would get virtually nothing and Apple would be awarded as much as $2.2 billion,” Dilger writes. “A fourth possible verdict could result in awarding Apple even more than $2.2 billion in damages… On top of a finding of willful infringement, Samsung’s worse case scenario would also involve sales bans of all of its infringing products and every substantially similar product variant that also infringed Apple’s patents. A sales ban would interrupt Samsung’s entire ‘copy & cash out’ strategy, forcing it to scramble to change how its products work before it could begin selling them again. ”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In other words, options 1 and 2 are Florian Müller’s wet dreams and 3-5 are his bad, worse, and worst nightmares.
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Apple v. Samsung II Jury asks if Google was cited when Steve Jobs sued – May 1, 2014