Unfavorable verdict for Samsung

A US jury orders Samsung Electronics to pay compensation to Apple.
A US court jury orders Samsung Electronics to pay US$539 million for infringing Apple's design patents.

A US court jury handed down a verdict that Samsung Electronics should pay US$539 million for infringing Apple's design patents.

Bloomberg and IT media outlet C-Net reported on May 24 (local time) that the jury of the US federal branch court in San Jose, California arrived at the verdict to order Samsung Electronics pay US$539 million in compensation to Apple in a lawsuit against the Korean electronics company for the infringement of Apple’s design patents.

The lawsuit is limited to Samsung Electronics’s compensation for its violation of Apple's design patent rights. In a lawsuit filed in 2011, the US court judged that Samsung Electronics infringed Apple’s design patents but the Supreme Court remanded the original judgment after quashing it by accepting an appeal by Samsung Electronics that there were some problems in standards on the calculation of the damages.

Apple asked Samsung to pay $1 billion in damages. The sum was based on US$2.3 billion in sales and $1 billion in profits that Samsung Electronics recorded by selling smartphones that infringed Apple’s design patents. Apple's lawyers have participated in the trial with the logic, “Design is everything.”

Samsung Electronics has claimed the damages amount is US$28 million. The Samsung Electronics side asserted that standards on calculating the damages should cut across some parts of the products not the whole products.

After five days of deliberation after the end of the trial on May 18, the jury concluded that Samsung Electronics should pay US$539 million for design patent infringement and US$5.3 million for the violation of utility patent rights.

"Today's decision flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung on the scope of design patent damages. We will consider all options to obtain an outcome that does not hinder creativity and fair competition for all companies and consumers," Samsung said in a press release.

"We believe deeply in the value of design, and our teams work tirelessly to create innovative products that delight our customers. This case has always been about more than money,” Apple said in a statement.

The first judgment on the design patent dispute between the two companies came out in late 2012. The verdict said that Samsung Electronics infringed Apple’s three patents – the basic design of Apple's black rectangle smartphones and tablets with rounded corners, LCD screen edges (front face rim), and application arrangement (icon grid).

Samsung Electronics already paid US$548 million in damages to Apple in 2015. Among them, design patent damages amounted to US$399 million.

C-Net predicts that if the jury verdict is finalized, the Korean smartphone giant will have to pay an additional US$140 million which is more than damages already paid.

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