Apple, Samsung may face off in May for damages retrial
Apple and Samsung have been battling over patents for five years. 
Apple v. Samsung may end up back before a jury in mid-May.
The two companies, in a joint court filing Wednesday, proposed a retrial to determine damages for patent infringement take place from May 11 to May 18. They will appear before a judge in San Jose later Wednesday to talk about their proposal.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh on Sunday had ordered another trial following a Supreme Court ruling a year ago that said damages could be determined differently than they typically had been in the past. Damages for design patent infringement, the justices said, can be based only on the part of the device that infringed the patents, not necessarily on the entire product.
The companies have been battling over patents since 2012, and a question about how much money could be owed for infringing design patents made it all the way to the Supreme Court in late 2016. In December, the highest court in the land, in a unanimous opinion, issued its ruling on the scope of the infringing "article of manufacture."
That ruling reshapes the value of designs and how much one company may have to pay for copying the look of a competitor's product. Before that time, the law said an award could be collected on the entire profits of an infringing device. In this case, that's the $399 million Samsung paid Apple last last year.
But the Supreme Court didn't give guidance on how damages should be decided, and in February, an appeals court punted the case back to district court for the Northern District of California.
Apple had asked for the appeals court to uphold the earlier damages ruling because Samsung never showed an "article of manufacture" to be anything other than an entire phone. Samsung, meanwhile, wanted the case sent back to district court for a new damages trial.
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