Apple’s lengthy battle with Samsung came to a close last Friday when a jury decided Samsung was guilty of infringing six of Apple’s patents, and that it must pay more than $1 billion in damages as a result. Not only was this a huge blow to Samsung, but it appears it’s also hit the Korean company’s customers, too.
One used electronics company has seen a 50% growth in the sale of Samsung devices as customers “jump ship” following its loss.
It isn’t too difficult to understand why the jury involved in the Apple versus Samsung case made the verdict it did last Friday, awarding Apple a landslide victory and more than $1 billion in damages. But what isn’t clear is how the jury came to its decision. Thanks to Jury Foreman Vel Hogan, we now have a fascinating insight into what it was like to be part of that panel.
In his first TV appearance since the billion dollar patent trial came to an end, Hogan reveals how he made up his own mind, how the jury decided on the damages Samsung must pay Apple, whether feelings and emotions influenced the jury’s decision, and more.
Apple’s victory in its patent trial against Samsung is already a few hours old but the shock of the damage tally is still hard to shake off. The final figure of $1,049,393,540.00 is a staggering rebuke of Samsung’s design and manufacturing process and may force the company toward more original ideas.
The completed jury verdict form, released late Friday night and attached below, reveals the Korean company maybe never really had a chance to win the case.
Apple has won a massive damages sum of nearly $1.05 billion in the patent trial against Samsung and the reaction from the technology community has been vast and swift.
In an email immediately following the verdict, Forrester Research Principal Analyst Charles Golvin told us the main takeaway from the verdict is the focus on innovation. Companies will now be forced to create legitimately different products, or at least engineer some without extravagantly similar features:
The jury particularly vindicates Apple’s software patents and their decision has implications not just for Samsung, but also for Google, other Android device makers like LG, HTC, and Motorola, but also potentially for Microsoft who employs features such as pinch to zoom, bounce on scroll, etc. These competitors are now forced to go back to the drawing board and come up with substantively different designs — or seek settlement terms with Apple. Since many of these controls are now built into the expectations of customers in how they work their phones, those are substantive challenges.
Gartner analyst and VP of Mobile Research Van Baker agrees the redesign of products in the long term is an issue but that it won’t affect any products anytime soon.
This is a clear win for Apple but it will have little impact on the market in the near term as it is highly likely that there will be an appeal so we will have to repeat the process. If sustained it has the potential to force Samsung to redesign a number of products and it will apply significant pressure on all smartphone and tablet makers to avoid trying to emulate the Apple designs as they bring new products to market.
Earlier, the two principals in the case immediately followed the shocking judgement with their own statements.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Seoul court ruled that Apple has infringed on two of Samsung’s patents. In addition, Apple must stop selling the infringing products in South Korea. Apple isn’t the only one at fault here, as the court also ruled that Samsung had infringed upon Apple’s “bounceback” patent. According to the WSJ’s Evan Ramstad:
Looks like a split decision overall in South Korea court, but Samsung faring better than Apple with judges.
In addition, Reuters reports that Apple has been given a small fine of roughly $35,400.
Judge Lucy Koh has overruled Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung trial and handed the Korean company a chance to get a better verdict. Rather than providing an adverse interference instruction against Samsung alone over deleted emails — as Judge Grewal ordered — the court will tell the jury exactly the same thing about both companies.
Apple has been named in a California lawsuit filed by EPL Holdings for allegedly infringing a patent that covers audio and video playback at varying speeds. The filing reports that EPL met with Apple back 2002 to discuss licensing over the patents it had developed. But the Cupertino company is alleged to have used the technology anyway without reaching a licensing deal.
If you’ve got a fairly recent MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, you’ll know that typing in a dark room is a breeze thanks to its backlit keyboard. It now seems as though Apple is looking to extend this feature to the trackpad as well. In a new patent filing entitled “Illuminated Touchpad”, the Cupertino company describes a new touch-sensitive input technology that doesn’t just light up, but also provides an “improved feedback mechanism.”
Could Apple be working on their own answer to Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator: a sophisticated program for professionals doing photo manipulation and digital illustrating? If a new patent is anything to go by, yes, and it won’t just be a major innovation on the Mac… it will work on the iPad as well.
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.
Apple is often accused by the likes of Samsung that it is unwilling to license its technology to competitors, but that’s not true. In fact, Apple has licensed many of its design patents to Microsoft, under the condition of an “anti-cloning agreement” that prevents Microsoft from releasing mere doppelgangers of the iPhone and iPad. You know, like Apple is accusing Samsung of doing.
For those of us watching the trial of Apple vs Samsung this week, the fact that Judge Lucy Koh made the companies reveal confidential sales data is something of a no-brainer. The jury will need to look at the sales of the various devices from the two mobile technology giants to decide at some point what the damages should be, if any.
Kodak is on the verge of bankruptcy, but in a final bid to raise some cash, the company is selling off its entire patent portfolio. The company believes it could fetch upwards of $2.6 billion, and Apple and Google are going head to head for them. However, neither company has submitted a bid anywhere near Kodak’s estimate.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned blogging about Apple, it’s that the company doesn’t stand for copycats — especially when those copycats go after patents that Steve Jobs was particularly proud of. That’s what Samsung did when it copied Apple’s inertial scrolling feature, right after Jobs told them not to.
Apple went after Samsung today in the most direct and perhaps damaging interchange, yet, using Samsung’s own internal documents to prove Apple’s claim that Samsung’s practices go beyond mere competition and are truly copyright infringement.
Apple called Justin Denison, Samsung’s chief strategy officer, to the stand today. Attorney for Apple Bill Lee, after some preliminary questioning, went right for the jugular, directly calling out Samsung, and asking Denison point blank if Samsung had copied Apple products. Denison denied the claim, and then Lee pulled out a set of internal documents from Samsung. Some of the titles of these reports were pretty incriminating.
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.
While some may consider the iPad’s Smart Cover to be too expensive and flimsy, Apple is obviously investing time and effort into the accessory. A recent patent has been uncovered that details an enhanced Smart Cover with a secondary touch display. Like Microsoft’s Surface tablet, the unreleased accessory would also have a keyboard embedded in the cover with virtual keys for typing.
By drawing power from the tablet inside, this patented Smart Cover design could extend the iPad’s screen with extra room for drawing, notifications, and icons around the device’s bezel. The patent also highlights using embedded solar cells and RF antennas to power the secondary display and keyboard. Sounds futuristic.
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.
In a not-so surprise move today, Apple filed a proposal with the US District Court that is handling Monday’s trial between it and rival Samsung over possible patent infringements. The surprise move today is the fact that Samsung agrees with Apple.
Both companies have to submit documents as exhibits in the wide-ranging trial, scheduled for Monday, and each company would like to keep it’s sensitive business data private. The two tech industry leaders today came up with a proposal that, if accepted, will have them jointly submitting documents they would like redacted from the public.
During the period of April 2010 and March 2012, gross margins on iPhone sales in the US ran 49 to 58 percent. Gross margins on iPad sales during the same period were much lower, according to a court filing in the Samsung vs Apple patent dispute that begins in earnest on Monday, scheduled to take place in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, called Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846.
The filing was unveiled today in a statement by an Apple expert witness, though Apple has declined to comment on the filing itself.
US District Judge George Daniels denied Apple’s proposal to move the patent dispute with Eastman Kodak Company out of bankruptcy court and into his own District Court today. If Apple had been granted the proposal, it could have been tough going for Kodak’s plans to actually sell the technology.
The US Patent Office has awarded Apple another patent tonight, this one for the Cover-Flow interface that showed up in iTunes 7.0 in 2006, and then in the Finder as a view option in 2007 with Mac OS X Leopard and the iPhone itself.
US Patent Number 8,230,360 is credited to Jeffery Ma, Gregory Dude, Rachel Clare Goldeen, Justin Henzie, and Fainer Broderson, with Apple as the assignee. This patent was filed on January 14, 2008, which is a far less amount of time than the mouse cursor one granted today as well, but still – four years?
Today, the US Patent and Trademark office awarded Apple a utility patent that covers the use of the mouse cursor that changes according to the context of the task it is engaged in. Called a “Dynamically Changing Cursor for User Interface,” patent number 8,230,366 describes the functionality of the on-screen mouse cursor when it changes to the familiar spinning beach ball, the green plus symbol when copying files, or the red number of items being moved from one disk to another.
At a settlement conference last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and executives from Samsung Electronic disagreed on the value of the opposing parties’ patents. The two world’s largest companies of consumer electronics continue to disagree as the trial here in the US looms ahead, scheduled for July 30 in San Jose, California. According to a report by wire Reuters, Cook participated in mediation with Samsung’s Vice Chairman Choi Gee-sung and mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun last Monday in the San Francisco area to potentially resolve the dispute ahead of trial.
As if.
