Ondrej Holzman Just when one thought that the legal disputes over patents between Apple and Samsung were slowly calming down, a third party enters the case and may rekindle the fire. As a so-called friend of the court, the largest companies from Silicon Valley, led by Google, Facebook, Dell and HP, have now commented on the whole case, which are leaning on Samsung's side.
Protracted legal battles have been ongoing since 2011, when Apple sued Samsung for infringing its patents and copying key features of the iPhone. These included rounded corners, multi-touch gestures, and more. In the end, there were two big cases and the South Korean company lost in both, although they are not yet definitively over.
Silicon Valley's biggest companies have now sent a message to the court asking it to re-examine the case. According to them, the current decision against Samsung could "lead to absurd results and have a devastating impact on companies that spend billions of dollars annually on research and development of complex technologies and their components."
Google, Facebook and others argue that today's modern technologies are so complex that they must be made up of many components, many of which are used in different kinds of products. If any such component could then be the basis of a lawsuit, each company would be infringing some patent. In the end, this would slow down innovation.
“That feature—the result of a few lines out of millions of lines of code—may only appear in a certain situation when using the product, on one screen out of hundreds of others. But the jury's decision would allow the owner of the design patent to get all the profits generated by that product or platform, even though the infringing part might be quite insignificant to users," the group of companies said in their report, which pointed out magazine Inside Sources.
Apple responded to the companies' call by saying that it should not be taken into account. According to the iPhone manufacturer, Google in particular is very interested in the case due to the fact that it is behind the Android operating system, which is used by Samsung, and thus cannot be an objective "friend of the court".
So far, the last move in the protracted case was made by the appeals court, which reduced the originally awarded fine to Samsung from $930 million to $548 million. In June, Samsung asked the court to change its decision and have 12 jurors evaluate the case instead of the original three-member panel. It is possible that with the help of giants like Google, Facebook, HP and Dell, it will have more leverage.
