Apple Samsung patent case started again

Nanjing Hua Xun News: The patent war between Apple and Samsung is like a series that will never be updated. Prosecutions and counterclaims are full of them. Tomorrow Apple and Samsung will start a new round of war. This trial will be the design patents that Apple and Samsung have been "entangled" since 2011. It is worth mentioning that for the US Supreme Court, this is also the first lawsuit involving design patents in more than 120 years. The last time the product involved was carpet.

Brief review of events

The patent war between Samsung and Apple can be traced back to April 2001. Apple began to file a lawsuit against Samsung in the United States, claiming that Samsung had infringed Apple's patent rights, accused Samsung of infringing some of its iPad and iPad 2 designs, and claimed from Samsung. 2.5 billion US dollars, and demanded to stop selling its tablet products, thus the patent war between the two sides began. During this period, the two sides have gone through many appeals, counterclaims and re-appeals, and their wonderful depth is no less than the palace drama. Both sides try to attack each other at every opportunity, as in the recent US election debate.

It's still a matter of money

The patent war lasted for five years. In the final analysis, the two sides were entangled in one word: money.

Apple sued Samsung in 2011, claiming that Samsung's mobile phone infringed a number of patents on Apple's iPhone. The court ruled in 2012 that Samsung infringed Apple's patents and demanded that Samsung pay Apple $1.05 billion in compensation.

Later, the presiding judge, Lucy Koh, ordered a retrial, saying that the jury had miscalculated and that $0.45 billion in damages should be removed from the trial. In the end, Samsung was ordered to compensate Apple $0.93 billion after recalculation. Subsequently, Samsung filed an appeal.

Last May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the $0.93 billion in damages needed to be reassessed. In the end, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals asked Samsung to pay $0.5482 billion like Apple. However, Samsung was still dissatisfied with the ruling, believing that the $0.399 billion in compensation was unreasonable and finally appealed to the Supreme Court. Michael Ricky, a professor at Villanova University School of Law in the United States, said that after years of fierce confrontation, (Samsung) infringement has been confirmed, and the lawsuit is currently more about money.

Recently, the US Federal Court ruled on Apple's previous appeal and restored the infringement ruling against Samsung, including Samsung's infringement of Apple's patent for sliding unlocking smartphones and tablets. In the ruling, the U.S. federal court ruled that Samsung should pay $0.1196 billion to Apple. On Tuesday (October 11), the U.S. Supreme Court will accept the case and conduct a hearing on the case, mainly to hear the reasons why Samsung Electronics believes that the amount of compensation should be reduced.

The world view is different.

Samsung has said that if Apple wins the case, it is stifling innovation. Apple has said that if Samsung wins the case, it would mean weakening the protection of innovation.

In fact, from the above two sentences, we can see that the two sides have different interpretations of patent protection. Samsung did not positively admit that it infringed Apple's patents, but it did not completely deny it. Samsung said that the value of smart phones is not all in the design, and practical patents are also its core value. The jury's judgment of Samsung infringement is a wrong interpretation of Article 1886 of the patent law. Does this mean that Samsung has already acquiesced in its infringement of Apple's design patent?

Apple, on the other hand, believes that Samsung has been infringing on its own patents for a long time and is well known. Apple hopes to tell people through the victory, patent innovation should be protected in this way. The reason why the patent war between apple and Samsung is closely watched by the industry is that there will be more and more cases of this type in the future. The final conclusion of the case between apple and Samsung will affect the whole industry and play an exemplary role in similar events in the future.

Take, for example, this year's Apple FBI battle. What Apple cares about is not that one iPhone was easily unlocked in one case, but that millions of iPhones were unlocked in the future. Once a bad precedent is set, it will have a profound impact on future cases.

According to Nanjing Hua Xun US patent understanding, the hearing will be held at 10 am US time, lasting one hour. However, this trial will not produce a final decision. The annual recess of the U.S. Supreme Court is June 30. Foreign media predict that the trial result of the patent case will come out before that, and it is likely to make a ruling in the first quarter of 2017. The case has attracted many people's attention. Dell, eBay, Facebook, Google, HP and other technology giants have voiced their support for Samsung. At the same time, more than 100 professionals and scholars in the design industry jointly supported Apple, some of whom are well-known global brand designers such as Nike and Calvin Klein.

Nanjing Huaxun epilogue

There will be more and more patent litigation cases like Apple and Samsung in the future, but in terms of scale and duration, I dare not say that there will be no future, but at least it is unprecedented. The smartphone industry has encountered bottlenecks, and products have become more and more "similar". To a large extent, there are problems with innovation. The result of the case of Apple and Samsung will have more or less impact on the future product design of the industry. For the two companies that are used to competitive relations, the results of this trial will also affect the momentum of direct confrontation between the two sides in the future. Although for both sides, this battle is not to lose, but both sides do not want to lose.