Apple wins a billion dollars in patent case
A San Jose jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages for patent infringement against Samsung.
The Wall Street Journal reported that
Jurors Friday found that Samsung infringed all but one of the seven patents at issue in the case—a patent covering the physical design of the iPad. They found all seven of Apple’s patents valid—despite Samsung’s attempts to have them thrown out. They also decided Apple didn’t violate any of the five patents Samsung asserted in the case
This amount was the third largest in history but could go higher because the U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh has to decide what amount of punitive damages should be added because the jury found the infringement was “willful.”
This case is evidence that the patent system is there to protect the ideas of the innovative. Some articles have come out since that have questioned whether or not the amount is a little high. It comes out to about $50 per phone.
The argument is that because there are so many patents on every single cell phone (it is been estimated that about 250,000 patents applied to each cell phone) and if you only infringe on one or two of those it should only be pennies per cell phone. Brian J. Love wrote an article for the LA Times entitled “Apple-Samsung patent fight: Fuzzy math“
If you were to divide the average retail price of a smartphone — about $400 — by those 250,000 potentially applicable patents, you’d find that each one would account for just $0.0016 of the phone’s value. And, in reality, even that’s too much, once you factor in the costs of raw materials, labor, transportation and marketing, which also contribute to a phone’s value.
Manus Cooney wrote an article for IP watchdog.com in which he describes the victory as an American victory and foreign smart phone developers and the like should be wary of stealing US innovation. And he replies to the critics of the decision by saying “What the critics have not explained is how making it easier for a foreign company like Samsung to steal US-born innovation is in our long-term national interest.”
The bottom line is that patent enforcement in the United States is clearly a priority of American litigation at this time. There are patent trolls and companies constantly filing new patent lawsuits in an attempt to enforce their patent rights. This litigation and others are examples of how important it is to protect your intellectual property rights by filing a patent application.
