Apple’s heated battle with Qualcomm is continuing and, as part of it, the company wants a legally sanctioned block to be placed on import iPhones featuring Intel chips.
However, a group of Apple consumers is striking back, arguing that any kind of an import ban would, “freeze out Intel’s nascent challenge to Qualcomm’s illegal monopoly” and “injure competition in a market already suffering from Qualcomm’s anticompetitive behavior.”
There have been no shortage of days in court in the ongoing Samsung vs. Apple legal battle, which has raged since 2012. Something that is lacking? Unbiased jurors, apparently.
While a new round of courtroom drama kicked off this week, it apparently took a long time on day one to find jurors who were in a position to make a non-biased judgement. In all, multiple candidates were excused for various reasons of partiality. Here are some of them.
Apple has claimed final victory in a lawsuit arguing that the company was purposely intercepting and failing to deliver texts sent from iPhones to Android owners.
The case was related to Apple’s iMessage service, which posed a challenge to Apple-to-Android switchers up until 2014, when Apple finally issued a fix for the problem.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh may reject a plea put forward by Apple, Google, and two other companies following a lawsuit which accused Apple of participating in anti-poaching practices.
As previously reported, Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar all stood accused by former employees, although Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar quickly agreed to settle — paying a collective $20 million.
The remaining companies — Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe — faced a possible damages payout of $3 billion, although this could potentially rise to as much as $9 billion under antitrust laws. After an appeal refusal, the companies ended up settling for the comparatively small tiny of $324.5 million.
Understandably, not everyone was pleased with the result: with plaintiff Michael Devine calling the sum “grossly inadequate,” and demanding that it be rejected. Now it seems that he could get his wish.
Apple might be among the companies which settled the Silicon Valley anti-poaching dispute out of court last month, but one plaintiff isn’t happy — calling the $324 million settlement “grossly inadequate.”
The trial was supposed to begin at the end of May, which would have potentially led to months of revelations about Apple’s anti-poaching practices. Ultimately the four tech companies involved, including Apple and Google, settled for $324 million: a figure substantially lower than the $3 billion in damages requested by the suit, or the $9 billion which could have been awarded if the defendants were found to be guilty in court.
Samsung is trying to weasel out of paying up to Apple, asking Judge Lucy Koh for a mistrial based upon the supposedly “racist” remarks of Cupertino’s attorneys. But Judge Lucy Koh was having none of it.
There are few tech terms more loaded than “user privacy” here in 2013.
Back in January Cult of Mac reported that Apple had lost its spot on a list of the 20 most trusted companies when it comes to user information. That was long before the revelations of Edward Snowden and PRISMgate (the subject of an entire recent issue of our Newsstand magazine), which made everyone super-jumpy about data collection and what it means for personal liberties.
In latest news from the Samsung vs. Apple patent case, Samsung on Wednesday filed an emergency motion with presiding Judge Lucy Koh to halt Apple’s damages retrial.
Why the halt? Because according to court documents, the US Patent and Trademark Office has suggested that Apple’s “pinch to zoom” patent (which much of the patent trial revolves around) might not actually be valid.
In case you’ve missed it, there are currently two cases being heard by US District Judge Lucy Koh in the Apple v Samsung patent legal struggle. The first one, Apple won a $1.05 billion verdict last fall against Samsung, which Judge Koh pulled about $450 million off of, and then ordered a new damages trial. She also rejected Apple’s request for a permanent sales ban. Apple appealed, but we’re waiting for a ruling till September, most likely.
US District Court Judge Lucy Koh today denied Apple’s request to have several documents sealed from public view in its fight to recoup more damages from Samsung than were even awarded by the jury several weeks ago. The documents include “product-specific unit sales, revenue, profit, profit margin, and cost data” that it also wants to use in its argument for a higher award from the court.
Judge Koh basically said that Apple can’t have it both ways. Her decision says to the Cupertino-based company that it can’t use documents in its arguments that it then in turn wants to keep secret. It just doesn’t work that way.
Check out the image above, and then marvel that Samsung put this together for the court case it lost to Apple a couple weeks back in US District Court. Judge Lucy Koh understandably excluded the slide from Samsung’s final argument documents – these comparisons have nothing to do with the actual merits of the case, but rather show that Apple was asking for a lot of money in damages.
Regardless of the facts, though, this image is pretty hilarious. It does show what a crazy amount of money companies are taking in and/or losing in our current “touch economic times,” rendering the phrase meaningless when set next to these kinds of figures.
Samsung may have been treated unfairly when the trial’s magistrate Judge refused to admit new evidence into the case late in the game despite the fact it had allowed Apple to order an earlier sanction against it, a prominent law blog is reporting.
A post in Groklaw.net says Samsung may build a case around the issue of unfairness in an attempt to throw out the verdict if the jury goes against it.
The jury will hear instructions to find a verdict for multiple counts of patent infringement claims in today’s court session of the Apple-Samsung trial. After terms are set, lawyers from each side will gather their final arguments and present them to the jury with the hope of resolving the first skirmish in a series of big legal battles between them.
Only this skirmish is more significant that most. It could end up inflicting very serious financial blows if either one receives a large reward figure or patent nullification. According to financial analysts who testified at the trial last week, a full finding against could cost Samsung upwards of $2.5B and Apple more than $500M. These figures are based on combinations of profit-loss estimates of products sold. The jury can consider and amend these figures as needed. The jury may, for example, choose to give Apple a reward based on the average high-end price point of iPhone applications, at $1.49 an app, as opposed to the median app price of $.99.
But that’s just one possibility. Apple could suffer blows to its lucrative and proprietary touch-screen and mobile technology that has helped push the company towards its current status as the most valuable company in the world.
At the end of a long trial day, US District Court Judge Lucy Koh, who’s been the presiding justice over the course of both pre-trial and actual trial, urged that Apple and Samsung speak together to try and resolve their differences out of court before the jury comes back to deliberate on the evidence that has been presented by both sides this week and last.
“It’s time for peace,” Koh said, adding, “I see risks here for both sides.”
Judge Lucy Koh has once again made a plea of Apple and Samsung to make peace in their patent dispute before a verdict is handed down. Not doing so, the federal judge warns, could be a danger to both Apple and Samsung.
Remember the excluded Samsung documents we told you about yesterday? The ones that Samsung sent out to the media after they had been denied the ability to enter them into court? We told you how Samsung’s lawyer, John B. Quinn, argued that sending them along to journalists was neither unethical nor illegal. Apple has a different opinion, which they filed in court today.
In the latest filing in the Apple vs Samsung patent case, the Korean-based electronics company argued that the documents they leaked after US District Judge Lucy Koh excluded as trial evidence were public domain, anyway, and that Samsung had done nothing wrong or unethical.
Today, Apple and Samsung both presented their opening arguments in front of US District Court Judge Lucy Koh in the second day of the legal case originally brought by Apple against Samsung for patent infringement. Samsung countersued, claiming its own patents were infringed upon. Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, No. 11-1846 began yesterday with jury selection, and opening statements were made today, along with some expert testimony by Apple designer Christopher Stringer.
Not surprisingly, Apple believes that Samsung has copied the iPhone wholesale. Korea-based Samsung continues to repeat that it has not copied anything, but rather a simple matter of American-style competition.
Lawyers for both sides squared off today in court with their opening arguments.
An interesting jury has been selected today in the high-profile patent case between Apple and Samsung. Of course, any details about said jury would be interesting simply due to their inclusion in such a pivotal legal case, but the list does sound like somewhat of a lead in to a stand-up comedy routine. An insurance agent, an unemployed video game enthusiast, and a project manager for AT&T are three of the ten jurors selected today to decide the issues behind the patent case between the two electronics superstar companies.
A mere ten days before the scheduled patent infringement trial between Samsung and Apple, US District Judge Lucky Koh rejected two more proposals from Samsung, maker of Android enabled smartphones. Judge Koh entered a supplemental claim construction order in which two disputed terms are now defined. Unfortunately for Samsung, who initially requested the order, the definition decision favors Apple, using the Cupertino-based tech company’s definition in the dispute.
US District Court Judge Lucy Koh rejected requests today from both Apple and Samsung regarding the parties’ proposal to keep portions of key legal documents out of the public eye during their upcoming patent case in California this month.
If you’ve been following all the current pre-trial back and forth between Apple and Samsung in the Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846 case, in which Apple has claimed Samsung is infringing on several patents, Samsung has counterclaimed similar infringement arguments, and Apple’s request for a temporary sales ban on the Samsung Nexus Phone has been accepted and enforced by the court.
You’ll also know that Judge Koh has been steadily, one might say doggedly, dealing with both parties, trying to keep the case as relevant, simple, and direct as possible.
In the continuing saga of Apple and Samsung in the copyright infringement trial in California recently, it seems as if Apple has a much stronger position than many people might believe. This isn’t a case of Apple stifling innovation, but rather of Samsung knowing very well that it has a weak case in both the claims it is defending against as well as the claims it has brought to court itself.
Both Samsung and Apple filed pre-trial juror screening questionnaires with the US District Court that is handling the patent dispute originally filed by Apple agains Samsung. Potential jurors will have to answer close to 750 questions unless Judge Koh, the District Judge who has been handling this case, asks for some winnowing of the number of questions. 49 of those questions are from Apple, with the remaining 700 filed by Samsung. That’s six pages to forty pages, respectively.
Apple and Samsung already narrowed the field of their California-based lawsuits against each other back in May of this year, pending a July 30 trial. Late yesterday, however, both parties filed a joint statement about narrowing the complaint field further in response to Judge Lucy Koh’s request they do so.
This makes perfect sense, especially when she already restricted their court time back in June. As Florian Mueller (FOSSPatents) points out, each of the large number of intellectual property (IP) arguments is already fairly complex. Trying to argue a ton of them at once would be unmanageable.
After all the back and forth-ing going on between Apple, Samsung, Google, and the US District Court lately, it’s hardly a surprise that the Nexus phone has undergone some changes on the Google Play website’s “Devices” sales page.
The target of Apple’s successful request to ban US sales of was taken down earlier this evening from the Play site, as reported on 9 to 5 Mac, and is currently back, but only as a “Coming Soon” item.
