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27 June 2017Patents

SCOTUS asks for government views in Samsung v Apple dispute

The US Supreme Court has asked the government for its views in the patent infringement clash between Samsung and Apple.

Yesterday, June 26, the acting solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall, was invited to file a brief expressing the view of the US.

In February this year, WIPR  reported that Samsung was gearing up to brawl again with Apple, with the South Korea-based company applying for more time to file a petition for a writ of certiorari.

The lawsuit went to trial in 2014 at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, where the court ruled that Samsung’s smartphone devices infringed US patent number 8,074,172, and a jury found it had infringed two US patents: 5,946,647 and 8,046,721.

Samsung was ordered to pay $119.6 million in damages but it appealed.

In February last year, a panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s decision.

But Apple filed a petition for rehearing en banc and the Federal Circuit, in an 8–3 majority decision, overturned the panel’s decision and reinstated Apple’s $119.6 million verdict.

Samsung filed its petition for certiorari in March this year, claiming that the en banc decision makes it “virtually impossible to invalidate even the most trivial patents”.

The petition also arose from a separate decision, on interlocutory review, where a different Federal Circuit panel “insisted over a vigorous dissent that the district court should have issued a permanent injunction despite detailed findings of lack of irreparable harm”.

Samsung, in its petition, argued that an injunction obtained by Apple is also “exceptionally important” and, if allowed to stand, “would create widespread harm to the patent system”.

“There could hardly be a weaker case for an injunction than this one,” claimed Samsung, adding that the Federal Circuit had created “new and incorrect patent law”.

“The patents covered very specific and limited ways of performing three features out of tens of thousands on a smartphone, the district court found unequivocally that the patented features did not drive sales of smartphones, and Apple has previously licensed the patents-in-suit.”

The Supreme Court has been asked to answer whether past case law requires a court to hold patents obvious as a matter of law under 35 USC section 103 where the patents “make at most trivial advances over technologies well-known to a person of skill in the art”.

It will also answer whether the court's decision in eBay v MercExchange requires application of the four-factor test for injunctions in accordance with traditional equitable principles.

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24 February 2017   Samsung is gearing up to brawl again with Apple at the US Supreme Court.
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6 October 2017   The US Supreme Court should deny Samsung’s petition to hear its patent dispute with Apple, according to the US Department of Justice.