Is The Samsung And Apple Battle Not Over Yet?

The Supreme Court weighs in on this 5 year old matter, and turns it, and a very premise on it’s head.

The battle lines between Samsung and Apple have been drawn ever since the smartphone market began to take form, but the heat got turned up when the squabble over smartphone patents went to court in the U.S.

There were several rounds of suits and counter suits, dragging the matter all the way into 2016. Apple seemed to be winning for the most part, but recently there was a twist in the tale; and an interesting one at that, which sets an important precedent for in an effervescent space.

In the first week of December 2016, the United States Supreme Court favoured Samsung’s plea, when it ruled that Samsung did not have to pay the USD 399 million penalty ascribed by an earlier Appeals Court ruling, awarded to Samsung’s American rival, for supposedly copying their iPhone designs.

Some background. The battle had begun in 2011, when Apple sued Samsung, stating that the rival South Korean brand had stolen Apple’s technology, and iPhone’s trademark appearance.

Consequently, in 2012, Apple Inc. was awarded a sum of USD 930 million in damages, following a verdict that Samsung had infringed Apple’s iPhone patents and mimicked its distinctive appearance in their own Galaxy- and other similar devices.

After that, in May 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington upheld the verdict however, additionally stated that iPhone’s appearance could not be protected by trademark law. This led to the damages to be paid to Apple to be reduced by USD 382 million. Hence, Samsung, back in last December, paid up USD 548 million to Apple in damages.

Since then Samsung has been fighting the case, looking to get a chunk of their money back. They took Apple back to the court, stating that they should not have had to make the USD 399 million of that payout for copying the patented designs.
The patent designs in question are iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel and a colorful grid of icons that represent programs and applications.

Apple argument this far has been based around their design, stating that their unique design and features enable them to have the position in the market that they do, and further argues that other companies have been indiscriminately adopting these designs into their products, endangering Apple’s customer base, and thus their position in the market.

On the other hand, Samsung did not base its argument on completely denying adopting any of Apple’s designs, instead stated that if they did copy Apple’s designs, they applied those elements with a combination of others and that they contributed only marginally to a complex product with thousands of patented features.

That seems to have held water with the apex court. Thus the latest ruling.

Another important point that the latest decision holds up is that a patent violator does not always have to fork over its entire profits from the sales of products using ‘stolen’ designs if the designs covered only certain components and not the whole thing.

This brings the law regarding damages for infringement of design patents into a new area of uncertainty and might have bigger implications for designers, especially in the light of the fact that design copyrights and patents are very expensive and cumbersome to get in the first place.

Given this new ‘loophole’ or in other words ‘dilution’ of rights that the creators may have over patent design/innovations, this has not have gone down well with some experts.
“That rule was designed to make sure copyists didn’t just treat the possibility of a lawsuit or payment of damages as an incidental business expense”, stated Susan Scafidi, the academic director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University School of Law, believing that this was definitely a victory for those who steal ad copy designs.
“Now, with damage awards limited to the percentage of profits attributable to the copying, design patents are much less valuable to creators. Not only are the potential awards or settlements lower, but the costs of calculating and litigating the amount of damages are higher”.

With this latest ruling, pretty much backing Samsung, what the apex court did was that it gave Samsung the chance to get a chunk of the punitive payout back.

We can close with an interesting fact that the Supreme Court in the U.S. hardly ever hears on patent battles and that it hasn’t done so in over the last 120 years. The very fact that, that’s where this battles has reached speaks volumes for how big these seemingly small ideas of patent infringement and supposed stealing of designs can get, especially when the parties involved are the likes of Apple and Samsung.

The case, however, is not over yet.

The judges, in an 8–0 vote count, sent the case back to a lower court for further proceedings, having repealed one particular ruling. What this means is that the battle still continues on whether the “article of manufacture” involved is the entire smartphone or just certain components, and then to determine what Samsung owes.

Apple, for now, has stated that its case “has always been about Samsung’s blatant copying of our ideas, and that was never in dispute”. It went on to add, “We remain optimistic that the lower courts will again send a powerful signal that stealing isn’t right”.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.