“Lucy H. Koh’s fingerprints are on your Gmail account, your smartphone, and, if you’re a Silicon Valley engineer, possibly your prospects for changing jobs,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg.
“Koh, the California federal judge overseeing the three-year patent battle between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., has so far thwarted the iPhone maker’s bid to keep Galaxy phones off the market,” Rosenblatt reports. “Koh’s ascent to influence in Silicon Valley has been swift. The 45-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2010, making her one of the youngest appointees among more than 600 active federal judges and the first Korean-American U.S. district court judge.”
“In Apple’s first U.S. patent-infringement suit against Samsung, filed in 2011, Koh rejected Apple’s requests to ban sales of Samsung’s phones — even after the iPhone maker won a jury verdict finding that Samsung had infringed six of its patents. The legal basis for her decision, Koh explained, was that Apple failed to draw a close enough connection between Samsung’s infringement of patented features, and the sales Cupertino, California-based Apple claimed it had lost,” Rosenblatt reports. “An appeals court said Koh had set the bar too high and urged her to reconsider. Koh held her ground. In March 2014, she again said Apple hadn’t marshaled enough evidence to win a sales ban.”
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