The biggest of the string of legal battles between Apple and Samsung is back in the courts. Having won a landmark $1.05bn victory in a Silicon Valley court last year, Apple now has to fight to win that full sum in damages, even as it faces a retrial of a separate patents complaint against its rival.
That trial, described by Judge Lucy Koh as ‘Groundhog Day’, is not scheduled until March but the judge has asked the two firms to hold talks, probably at CEO level, to try to work out a settlement before that date.
She was speaking at the start of jury selection on Tuesday, at the beginning of hearings over Apple’s damages claim. At the first trial, held in August 2012, the jury awarded $1.05bn to Apple. That was far less than the $2.75bn the iPhone maker had sought, but in March 2013, Koh ordered a retrial to recalculate the damages. Apple will receive at least $600m but the remaining $450.5m is up for review by the new jury. That process is expected to last for about a week before the jury starts its deliberations.
In the first day of jury hearings, Apple attorney Harold McElhinny repeated much of the argument and evidence he presented at the original trial. This is no doubt in response to the judge’s direction that the retrial should contain ‘nothing new’. She also instructed the jury at the start to assume that the Samsung had infringed five Apple patents ‘ in other words, their only role is to decide the level of damages Samsung must pay.
Apple is asking for $379.7m, of the sum that Koh took away from the award, to be reinstated. McElhinny pointed out that, according to Apple calculations, Samsung had made $3.5bn from selling 10.7m infringing products in the US. Samsung’s lead lawyer, Bill Price, asked jurors to award Apple just $52m of the $410.5m at issue. He said that was ‘not a trivial sum’ and urged the jurors to keep an ‘open mind’. He added: ‘This is a case not where we’re disputing that the 13 phones incorporate some elements of Apples’ products. That doesn’t mean that Apple gets to come in here and ask for a windfall, far more than it’s entitled to.’
Koh had various issues with the original sum awarded. For instance, one of a list of Samsung models cited, the Galaxy Prevail, accounted for $57.9m of the damages, which Koh said was a failure on the jury’s part, since the device was found to infringe only on utility, not design, patents.
Meanwhile, Koh was angling to save the time and cost of another, similar legal case in the spring, in which Apple is alleging infringement of four of its patents by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and other devices. At the US District Court in San Jose, California, she told Samsung and Apple lawyers: “I ask that before March, there be one last, or additional, attempt to see if you can resolve these case.’
Her hopes did not seem to be high ‘ before making her plea, she remarked ‘even my chambers laughs at me when I mention settlement’. The parties agreed to have a proposal for talks by January 8, later than Koh had hoped, but she accepted the deadline. Cross-summary motions for the March trial still will take place on December 12, she said.