The battle between Apple and Samsung is hitting up again as both mobile phone making giants will head back to a district court for yet another design patent infringement trial.
It should be recalled that the lawsuit was originally settled in 2012, with a court ordering Samsung to pay Apple more than $1 billion in damages. The amount was reportedly beaten down by Samsung lawyers over years and it currently stands at $400 million however, a recent successful appeal from the South Korean electronics giant means the figure will now be reassessed at trial once again.
The verdict was passed yesterday by Judge Lucy Koh of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, with the ruling spotted and shared by patent lawyer Florian Mueller.
According an order written by Koh, “The Court finds that the jury instructions given at trial did not accurately reflect the law and that the instructions prejudiced Samsung by precluding the jury from considering whether the relevant article of manufacture was something other than the entire phone.”
Apple and Samsung didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the order signed on Sunday, Koh ordered the two tech giants to meet again in a courtroom to determine how much Samsung owes Apple for infringing three patents.
The decision follows a Supreme Court ruling a year ago that said damages could be determined differently than they typically had been in the past, with the infringing “article of manufacture” potentially being a part of a product instead of the entire product.
Apple and Samsung now have until October 25th to propose a date for the retrial, although Mueller suggests there is a 30 percent chance that the two companies will settle out-of-court instead. Although there’s still a lot of money on the table, both sides have proved their willingness to go to the mats on this issue (an important signal to send out to future would-be litigators). They also have a bigger battle to fight namely an upcoming legal battle with Qualcomm, in which Apple and Samsung will be fighting on the same side.
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.
Koh, in her order on Sunday, detailed how to define an “article of manufacture” at question in a case. Previously, Apple had argued the article of manufacture was an entire phone. Koh said the test for determining what item has been infringed will be based on four factors:
- “The scope of the design claimed in the plaintiff’s patent, including the drawing and written description;
- The relative prominence of the design within the product as a whole;
- Whether the design is conceptually distinct from the product as a whole; and
- The physical relationship between the patented design and the rest of the product, including whether the design pertains to a component that a user or seller can physically separate from the product as a whole, and whether the design is embodied in a component that is manufactured separately from the rest of the product, or if the component can be sold separately.”
Koh during the ruling also said the plaintiff, Apple, “shall bear the burden of persuasion on identifying the relevant article of manufacture and proving the amount of total profit on the sale of that article.”
In a separate ruling, Koh said that a case management meeting set for Oct. 25 will still be held and that both Apple and Samsung must file plans “advancing the case schedule and trial date” by that point.
