On Monday, Samsung Electronics Co. got a boost in the smartphone patent wars thanks to the US Supreme Court, which agreed to consider the appeal made by the South Korean company in a long-running and heated legal fight with its rival, Apple Inc. In a concise written order, the justices stated that a decision made by a lower court in the previous year would be reviewed. The decision had affirmed the findings of the jury that Apple’s patented designs for the iPhone had been copied by Samsung. Samsung had been ordered to pay damages worth $930 million to Apple for infringing upon its patents.
This spring, a lower court is already going to revisit part of the damages award, but the decision taken by the Supreme Court to intervene in this case gives a boost to efforts made by Samsung Electronics for nullifying the $399 million to be paid as infringement damages. The company believes that these damages have been incorrectly rewarded to Apple. In December, Samsung had agreed to pay Apple Inc. a sum of $548 million even though it had reserved the right to ask for reimbursement if the high court made a decision in its favor. While the two firms have been embroiled in a number of legal battles, the review by the Supreme Court comes in the highest-profile patent case that began in 2011.
A trial was conducted in 2012 after which a jury declared a number of Samsung devices, which included the Droid Charge and Samsung Galaxy SII, had infringed on the patents of the iPhone maker. The petition submitted to the Supreme Court by Samsung aims to attack a subset of the said patents that focused on the design of the iPhone. It was argued by the firm that a lower court had wrongly awarded Apple the profit from Samsung phones that had infringed the patents and the court declared that it would attempt to resolve this matter.
A spokeswoman for Samsung said that the patent law can be fairly interpreted by the court, which will reward innovation and support creativity. While the Supreme Court agreed on one issue, Samsung was unable to convince it to take up another, which the company believes merited review. The South Korean giant argued that Samsung had been wrongly found liable by jurors for design infringement as, unlike Apple’s phones, its devices had rounded corners, rectangular shapes and flat screens with a grid of icons.
The order by the high court indicated that this question will not be considered. Samsung said that the aforementioned approach was not sensible as thousands of features are involved in a smartphone and they don’t have anything to do with a phone’s design. Apple urged the Supreme Court not to take up this case as the company believed that a well-settled law has been applied by a lower court for punishing Samsung for copying the iPhone. Oral arguments will be heard by the Supreme Court for this case in October, when it begins its next term.