A United States federal court jury has instructed Samsung to pay Apple $533 million compensation for replication iPhone design features in a patent case. Samsung said it is considering appealing against the Jury award. The case began seven years ago. Apple had been seeking a billion Dollars in damages saying they wanted to defend the work and creativity of their employees.
Other targets of Apple litigation sanctions the chip maker Qualcomm are believed to be using the case as a benchmark before decided whether or not to settle out of court.
Jurors tacked on an additional $5 million in damages for a pair of patented functions. The award appeared to be a bit of a victory for Apple, which had argued in court that design was essential to the iPhone.
The case was ardently watched as a precedent for whether design is so vital that it could actually be considered the “article of design” even in a product as complex as a smartphone.
“We don’t think it is supported by the evidence,” Samsung attorney John Quinn told US District Court Judge Lucy Koh after the verdict was read in her courtroom in Silicon Valley on Thursday.
“We have every concern about the determinations about the article of manufacture.”
Quinn declined an offer by the judge to send jurors back for further deliberation, saying Samsung would follow post-trial motions to address its concerns about the verdict.
Juror Christine Calderon said the panel agreed that one of the design patents the grid of colored icons did represent the whole phone, while the other two at issue in the trial were seen as the display assembly that gave the iPhone its look.
She compared it to the Mona Lisa: “you use the paint, but it is not the article of manufacture.”
“I had to really think about it,” the 26-year-old Calderon, a technical writer, said after Koh dismissed the jury.
“We kind of felt like we ended up at a happy medium.”
The case had been sent back to the district court following a Supreme Court decision to revisit an earlier $400 million damage award.
Apple reasoned in court that design was so integral to the iPhone that it was the “article of manufacture” and worth all the money Samsung made by copying the features.
