Apple and Samsung return to court in 'Groundhog Day' spat
Monday will be Groundhog Day for Apple and Samsung as the two smartphone makers go back to court in California for another round of their long-running patent battle.
Like Bill Murray reliving the same day over and over again in the 1993 classic film comedy, lawyers on both sides are still fighting over patent damages, seven years after Apple first sued Samsung for copying the iPhone.
A jury in San Jose will this week weigh up complex arguments over the value of Apple’s design patents, which describe the iPhone’s signature grid of colourful app icons and black rectangle with rounded corners.
“It is remarkable that this case is still going on,” says Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University. “The parties have already spent more on lawyers than can possibly be at stake in the remaining case.”
This week’s retrial will be the third time the same set of five patents have been the subject of litigation.
In 2012, a jury awarded Apple $1.05bn in damages from Samsung but that sum was later reduced by Judge Lucy Koh after errors were found in the jury’s calculations.
A retrial in 2013 handed Apple $290m but Samsung appealed to the Supreme Court, where it argued against the basis of the original ruling that damages from a single design patent could amount to a product’s entire profits.
In December 2016, the Supreme Court agreed with Samsung that for products with many components, such as smartphones, the damages could be proportionate to the specific parts that were copied.
However, the justices did not provide a final determination on how the damages should be calculated, sending the case back to San Jose again.
The jury this week will be instructed to consider Apple and Samsung’s arguments as though they had woken up in 2012, under what Judge Koh has called her “Groundhog Day” principle.
That means Samsung can fall back on the same metaphor it has been using for years: that a carmaker should not have to hand over a vehicle’s entire profits because it copied another car’s cupholders.
Apple, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, could still demand hundreds of millions of dollars in damages on the grounds that it sells the iPhone as a complete package, not in component parts.
This time around, the jury will not have to decide whether Samsung infringed Apple’s patents — only the appropriate penalty.
In the meantime, the Samsung devices that were found to have copied the iPhone — such as Captivate, Epic, Gem and Vibrant — have long since left the market.
Since the proceedings began in 2011, smartphones have changed a lot. Screens have got much larger, processors more powerful and there are millions more apps available.
However, Samsung and Apple remain the world’s top two smartphone makers by unit shipments, according to market researchers IDC, just as they were at the beginning of 2012. With the decline of Nokia and BlackBerry, the dominance of Google’s Android operating system has only grown since then.
Apple’s persistence in prosecuting the case, rather than settling out of court, will be disheartening to other targets of its litigation, such as chipmaker Qualcomm, whose chief executive said recently he hoped the two companies would settle their own patent litigation before the end of the year.
“The reason I suspect Apple filed suit [against Samsung] in the first place — to try to disrupt the then-emerging Android ecosystem — no longer seems relevant,” says Mr Lemley. “Perhaps the parties just don't like each other very much.”
Post a Comment