Ondrej Holzman Last week judge Lucy Koh delivered the last verdict so far in the dispute between Apple and Samsung. Among other things, the decision from last year that Samsung must pay over 900 million dollars for copying was also confirmed. However, the battle that started in 2012 is far from over - both sides immediately appealed and the legal wrangling is expected to continue for a long time...
Samsung was the first to appeal, only 20 hours after the verdict was confirmed, that is, last week. The South Korean company's lawyers, in a very quick reaction, clearly indicated that, in their opinion, Koh's current decision is not correct and they want to drag the whole case to further recalculation of the compensation.
The decision, which was already made in August 2012, could be appealed only now, as the case was reopened last November due to errors in the calculation of compensation. Finally the court fined Samsung a total of $929 million.
In the end, Kohova did not approve Apple's ban on selected Samsung products, but South Koreans are still not satisfied with the verdict. While Apple succeeded with most of its arguments, Samsung practically failed at all with its counterclaims. Moreover, as some members of the jury later admitted, after a while they got so tired of deciding the case that they preferred to decide in favor of Apple rather than deal with every single argument.
In its appeal, Samsung will apparently want to rely on the '915 pinch-to-zoom patent, Apple's most valuable multi-touch software patent in this case. If the circuit court were to agree with the USPTO's current view of the matter and decide that this patent should never have been granted to Apple, another reopening of the case would indeed have to happen. This would be the third lawsuit, involving over 20 products, and if the '915 patent was indeed invalidated, there is no way to estimate how the amount of compensation would change. But the court would have to recalculate everything again.
However, even Apple did not delay its appeal for too long. Even he doesn't like certain aspects of the latest verdict. It is likely that they will again try to ban the sale of some Samsung products in order to set the desired precedent for subsequent cases. One of them will come at the end of March, when the second big court case between the two companies will start.
