A courtruling this week may save Samsung more than two billion dollars. That may not be much comfort though, as it still faces a billion dollar payout to Apple.
Judge Lucy Koh have made a series of rulings this week on the ongoing legal battles between the two companies. The various patent claims, based on alleged similarities between smartphones and tablets, are the subject of two totally separate trials, both overseen by Koh.
The first was the one that led to a $1.05 billion award against Samsung last year, while the second has yet to get to court and deals with devices released since the original dispute began.
On the original trial, Koh has issued four sets of rulings this week. The first is a simple rejection of Samsung’s suggestion that she throw the whole case out and start again because the way she ran the trial hearings wasn’t fair. The second ruling rejects Samsung’s claim that the Apple patents in question were simply too vague to be enforcable.
Koh’s third ruling involves the issue of whether Samsung committed its infringement wilfully, meaning it knew it was doing wrong. That can allow a judge to triple a damages award made by a
jury. Although the jury said Samsung had acted wilfully regarding five out of the seven cases, Koh has exercised her right to ignore this verdict and leave the damages award untouched. She says that although Samsung did indeed breach the patents and must pay the price for doing so, it reasonably (if incorrectly) believed it was acting within the law.
Finally Koh threw out a series of Apple objections that effectively asked her to overturn the jury’s decision to reject some of its patents, along with a request for an extra $400 million in compensation because, well, why not.
In effect then, Koh simply said everything decided in the original trial verdict stands. She still has to deal with a Samsung request that either she reduce the $1.05 billion or allow a new jury to decide a new figure, but this doesn’t look particularly likely to happen. Once that’s out the way we can move on to Samsung’s formal appeal against the original verdict.
Meanwhile, in the separate second case dealing with the later devices (which is set to make it to court in March 2014), Koh has refused an Apple application for a pre-trial sales ban on Samsung’s Galaxy
Nexus.
Perhaps inevitably, Apple plans
to appeal this ruling.
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