US Supreme Court slashes Samsung's patent payout to Apple Samsung has claimed a Supreme Court victory that will see its $400m patent damages bill to Apple significantly reduced. The highest court in America ruled that the damages were incorrectly calculated and ordered a Californian district court to take another look at the case to calculate a smaller bill for the South Korean …
Sorry, you fail. It is a three dimensional rectangle, thus has 8 corners and so damages must be multiplied by at least that much.
If I had half an hour I'd try and wangle time as another dimension to double it up again to 16 as the phone is a four dimensional entity in space and time....
The lawyer cost is for future savings. The idea being that if you are big enough to fight of any action *especially* when you are prepared to spend more on lawyers than the actual cost of the award you dampen massively the enthusiasm for litigation against you in future - especially for marginal cases like this one.
In the UK there was a council who decided to fight all compensation cases against it where it felt the claimant was not legitimate - previously they had just paid up as the cost of settling was lower than taking it to court. This resulted in significant cost savings as less "no win - no fee" decided to take them on for marginal claims, or would quickly back down if they did. It took a bit of "short term pain", but did result in "long term gain".
The problem with "IP" law is that it has almost no bearing on reality, and certainly no bearing on morality. It's mostly just a racket devised by corporate lobbyists, acting purely for the benefit of unworthy monopolists.
Our perverse "IP" laws have done nothing to "give us nice things", in fact they quite explicitly inhibit any sort of progress, as Apple's fraudulent claim to the "invention" of rounded rectangles demonstrates quite admirably.
It's worth noting that most of the real inventions that these monopolistic hypocrites benefit from was actually developed with taxpayers money (usually via military funding). Their petty aesthetics do not qualify as "invention", even if they were somehow original, which they aren't.
Actually that example only further proves the illegitimacy of the entire "IP" regime, since the sun and planet gear system was actually invented by "the Scottish engineer William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt, but was patented by James Watt", who didn't.
"IP" is farcical, fraudulent and intrinsically plagiaristic. It's theft, pure and simple, which only makes the "IP" fraternity's ludicrous claims about "piracy" all the more ironic.
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Try looking at the farm which Prince Albert (he of the Queen Vic fame) had built near to Osborne House. Bricks were used which had rounded corners on door/window openings and at the building corners to make them safer when farmhands were bumbling about. I have a feeling that may pre-date and mobile phone, not just the iPhone.
I'll see your 1980s camping mirror, and raise you an Egyptian sarcophagus.
But actually you don't need to go that far to discover the true origins of Apple's "invention. Just look at pretty much any flatscreen display since they were first sold, circa 1997, at least a decade before Apple "invented" rounded rectangles.
"a victory for... all those who promote creativity, innovation"
Seriously? They're both just rectangles. Regardless of the nonsensical state of the patent industry and who the letter of the law says is at fault here, there was precisely zero creativity on display from any party here.
...how the hell this ever made it to an appeals court.
The first judge to ever hear this case should have invalidated the patent for being utterly and obviously trivial, fined the both of them for wasting the courts time, and put a stop to all this shit before it got rolling.
I'm not the first to point this out. In 2001 A Space Odyssey, the astronauts aboard the Discovery were seen to use flat tablets with rounded corners. Granted that they were movie props, but the concept clearly predates Steve Job's aspirations to take credit for the creation of the universe.
The SCOTUS only decided a very narrow point here, which won't necessarily result in "slashed" (or even reduced) damages:
"Held: In the case of a multicomponent product, the relevant “article of manufacture” for arriving at a §289 damages award need not be the end product sold to the consumer but may be only a component of that product...
Because the term “article of manufacture” is broad enough to embrace both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product, whether sold separately or not, the Federal Circuit’s narrower reading cannot be squared with §289’s text. Absent adequate briefing by the parties, this Court declines to resolve whether the relevant article of manufacture for each design patent at issue here is the smartphone or a particular smartphone component. Doing so is not necessary to resolve the question presented, and the Federal Circuit may address any remaining issues on remand."
Basically, they've said that the lower court's reasoning was wrong, but declined to say whether the conclusion reached by that reasoning was also wrong.
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