Samsung Vows to Fight Verdict in Apple Patent Case; Design Patent Issues Most Likely Grounds for Appeal
Samsung Electronics vowed to fight on in its legal battle with Apple over allegations of intellectual property violations, saying the company “will continue to do our utmost until our arguments have been accepted” (http://xrl.us/bnnd6h). A jury for the U.S. District Court of Northern California said late Friday that Samsung infringed on multiple Apple design and utility patents related to Apple’s iPhone products, awarding Apple more than $1 billion in damages. The jury did not find for any of the claims Samsung made in a countersuit, in which the company sought $421 million in damages, according to court documents.
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The jury’s decision allows Apple to seek an injunction to ban certain Samsung products from being sold in the U.S. Apple was set to file paperwork to start that process Monday. Samsung said it plans ask U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh to overturn the verdict, at a hearing Sept. 20, when Koh will consider a final ruling on the case. Even that is not likely to be the end of the case, intellectual property law experts from American University’s Washington College of Law said at a forum Monday. Samsung has several arguments it can make on appeal, they said.
The issues in the design patent infringement portion of the case could be Samsung’s most fertile ground for eventually appealing the case to the Supreme Court, said Washington College of Law professor Jonas Anderson. While few companies in the U.S. still show an interest in design patents, they became a major factor in the Samsung infringement case, he said. As the jury decided whether Samsung infringed on Apple’s patents on the design of its iPhone and iPad products, they reviewed charts that compared the designs of Samsung mobile phones before and after the 2007 release of the first iPhone, Anderson said. He acknowledged that one chart in the record showed the pre-iPhone Samsung phones “look like BlackBerrys -- they have keyboards, they have antennas, things that we don’t use anymore. After the iPhone, they all look very similar to Apple.”
But the iPhone’s simple design has become so universally imitated, Apple’s arguments may not stand up for long, said Washington College of Law professor Christine Farley said. She said she discussed the case with her young son, who asked whether, if Apple can claim to own simple design elements like a round-edged rectangle and a sleek black screen, “How can any other phone exist?” Apple documents comparing its products with Samsung’s apparently were influential in the jury’s decision, she said. “They were impressed with tangible, registered evidence.” “Those diagrams I think became pretty important to the jury in ways that they didn’t need to be [since the] law was probably stronger in theory, in argument, in [Apple’s] claims.”